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Ask any of the health-focused VCs to call one of many high AI startups and one title comes up over and over: an organization primarily based in Pittsburgh referred to as Abridge. And it’s a startup that launched earlier than OpenAI was a family title and LLMs entered the frequent Valley vocabulary.
In 2019, Shiv Rao, a training heart specialist, pitched Andy Weissman, basic associate at Union Sq. Ventures, on a startup thought. Rao referred to as it SoundCloud plus RapGenius for medication.
Whereas Weissman thought that evaluating a nascent AI-powered medical observe taking app with music internet hosting and lyrics transcription was a bit humorous, the idea resonated with him.
Rao defined that docs spend as much as two hours a day—sometimes exterior of standard working hours—typing notes that summarize what was mentioned with their sufferers that day. Such administrative duties have been inflicting doctor burnout for years, main some to go away the career altogether. Rao satisfied Weissman that the newest improvements in AI may dramatically scale back the period of time docs spend on the ever-growing paperwork burden.
This was years earlier than generative AI took the world by storm and captured VCs’ creativeness.
“It was a reasonably wacky thought. Nobody had accomplished it earlier than,” Weissman stated.
However Weissman and different USV companions favored that Rao was not solely a doctor on the College of Pittsburgh Medical Middle but additionally spent half his time as a company enterprise capitalist for that well being system, investing in well being tech startups. Rao’s staff and advisers have been additionally graduates and professors at Carnegie Mellon, one of many high establishments within the nation for engineering and AI analysis.
“[Shiv] had this uncommon mixture of skills: an entrepreneur with a really bold imaginative and prescient, with a extremely fascinating group,” Weissman stated. “It felt distinctive.”
Abridge additionally had a fundamental transcription product, which docs may obtain without spending a dime on their smartphones and begin utilizing throughout their interactions with sufferers. Their utilization shaped the idea of Abridge’s LLM.
Somewhat over 5 years after USV led a $5 million seed spherical into Rao’s startup Abridge, the corporate has change into one of the talked about and quickly rising AI-powered healthcare companies.
Though most firms are nonetheless very cautious about adopting AI instruments, massive medical programs are wanting to signal contracts with Abridge.
“The gross sales cycle for [health systems] will be 18 to 24 months,” stated Rao. “Once we began the corporate, we knew what we have been in for.” However with a four-year lead on a digital scribe product educated on 1000’s of doctor-patient conversations, and now that AI is booming, hospitals are out of the blue shopping for Abridge at a fast tempo, a stark distinction to their sometimes protracted buying conduct. The corporate has introduced a brand new well being system buyer almost each week for the reason that begin of 2024.
“We had constructed up all this potential power that turned kinetic nearly in a single day in January,” Rao stated. “College of Chicago, Sutter, Yale, Lee Well being, Christus, Emory and the listing goes on and on,” he stated.
AbridgePicture Credit: Abridge / Abridge
Massive hospitals will not be solely shopping for multi-thousand seat licenses of Abridge however, in lots of instances, publishing glowing critiques about how the well being tech’s software program is altering physicians’ lives. Hospital executives and docs are describing Abridge as “life-changing,” “magical,” and “one of the essential paradigm shifts inside our careers.”
One of many greatest criticisms of generative AI is that it nonetheless has few substantive enterprise functions. However digital medical observe taking appears to be a helpful software of the novel know-how.
Drowning in paperwork
“I’ve bought skilled PTSD and conflict tales about seeing sufferers after which having to spend hours and hours at evening writing notes and doing all this clerical work that basically distracts from the factor that issues most, which is your affected person, but additionally takes away from your individual private life,” Rao stated.
With Abridge recording within the background, a doctor can focus solely on the affected person with out having to fret about filling out particular fields within the medical report in the course of the go to.
The payback of AI-powered medical scribes are very straightforward to measure, says Dr. Lee Schwamm, chief digital well being officer at Yale New Haven Medical System, an Abridge buyer. That’s why so many well being programs are flocking to make use of them, significantly Abridge. . “It is without doubt one of the hottest merchandise within the AI house for the time being,” he informed Trendster.
As with many administrative issues in well being tech, in terms of choosing a vendor, crucial consideration is value and integration with Epic, an EHR utilized by most massive well being programs within the US, Schwamm stated. Abridge, which helps 14 overseas languages, together with Haitian Creole, Brazilian Portuguese and Punjabi, is usually the winner when well being programs are doing head-to-head comparisons with different AI-powered medical scribes, Schwamm stated.
Earlier this yr, Abridge gained a proper to be built-in inside Epic. After Abridge information a session and a physician stops the recording, “there’s a observe in English sitting inside Epic ready for them to shortly confirm, edit and alter it as they see match,” Rao stated.
Whereas Abridge seems to be forward of its opponents, which, apart from Microsoft-owned Nuance, embrace Ambiance, Nabla and Suki, Schwamm is just not sure will probably be in a position to preserve its lead over the long run.
“The large query is, do you want a devoted medical LLM to achieve success on this house?” he requested. “Or will the enormous basis fashions, GPT-4o, Google and Meta, get so good that they might ingest a whole corpus of medical notes and begin to ship efficiency that’s related?”
That line of inquiry reveals that these are nonetheless early days not only for digital medical observe taking however for many generative AI firms. The tempo of innovation is quick and livid, and as we speak’s winners may simply lose their edge.
“Abridge is forward by a size, but it surely’s early within the race,” Schwamm stated, “A horse can get a nasty knee and stumble, or it could actually maintain getting additional and additional forward.”
For now, most buyers Trendster talked to agree that Abridge is main the AI-powered medical scribe competitors. For that reason, cash has been pouring into the corporate.
In February, Abridge raised a $150 million Sequence C led by Lightspeed Ventures at a valuation of $850 million.
