Ask any of the health-focused VCs to call one in every of the highest AI startups and one name comes up over and another time: an organization based in Pittsburgh called Abridge. And it’s a startup that launched before OpenAI was a household name and LLMs entered the common Valley vocabulary.
In 2019, Shiv Rao, a practicing cardiologist, pitched Andy Weissman, general partner at Union Square Ventures, on a startup idea. Rao called it SoundCloud plus RapGenius for medicine.
While Weissman thought that comparing a nascent AI-powered medical note taking app with music hosting and lyrics transcription was a bit humorous, the concept resonated with him.
Rao explained that doctors spend as much as two hours a day—typically outside of standard working hours—typing notes that summarize what was discussed with their patients that day. Such administrative tasks have been causing physician burnout for years, leading some to go away the career altogether. Rao convinced Weissman that the newest innovations in AI could dramatically reduce the period of time doctors spend on the ever-growing paperwork burden.
This was years before generative AI took the world by storm and captured VCs’ imagination.
“It was a fairly wacky idea. Nobody had done it before,” Weissman said.
But Weissman and other USV partners liked that Rao was not only a physician on the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center but in addition spent half his time as a company enterprise capitalist for that health system, investing in health tech startups. Rao’s employees and advisers were also graduates and professors at Carnegie Mellon, one in every of the highest institutions within the country for engineering and AI research.
“[Shiv] had this rare combination of talents: an entrepreneur with a really ambitious vision, with a very interesting team,” Weissman said. “It felt unique.”
Abridge also had a basic transcription product, which doctors could download without spending a dime on their smartphones and begin using during their interactions with patients. Their usage formed the idea of Abridge’s LLM.
Slightly over five years after USV led a $5 million seed round into Rao’s startup Abridge, the corporate has turn out to be one of the crucial talked about and rapidly growing AI-powered healthcare businesses.
Although most corporations are still very cautious about adopting AI tools, large medical systems are wanting to sign contracts with Abridge.
“The sales cycle for [health systems] may be 18 to 24 months,” said Rao. “Once we began the corporate, we knew what we were in for.” But with a four-year lead on a virtual scribe product trained on 1000’s of doctor-patient conversations, and now that AI is booming, hospitals are suddenly buying Abridge at a rapid pace, a stark contrast to their typically protracted purchasing behavior. The corporate has announced a brand new health system customer nearly every week because the start of 2024.
“We had built up all this potential energy that turned kinetic almost overnight in January,” Rao said. “University of Chicago, Sutter, Yale, Lee Health, Christus, Emory and the list goes on and on,” he said.
Large hospitals will not be only buying multi-thousand seat licenses of Abridge but, in lots of cases, publishing glowing reviews about how the health tech’s software is changing physicians’ lives. Hospital executives and doctors are describing Abridge as “life-changing,” “magical,” and “one of the crucial necessary paradigm shifts inside our careers.”
One in every of the most important criticisms of generative AI is that it still has few substantive business applications. But virtual medical note taking appears to be a worthwhile application of the novel technology.
Drowning in paperwork
“I’ve got skilled PTSD and war stories about seeing patients after which having to spend hours and hours at night writing notes and doing all this clerical work that actually distracts from the thing that matters most, which is your patient, but in addition takes away from your personal personal life,” Rao said.
With Abridge recording within the background, a physician can focus entirely on the patient without having to fret about filling out specific fields within the medical record in the course of the visit.
The payback of AI-powered medical scribes are very easy to measure, says Dr. Lee Schwamm, chief digital health officer at Yale Latest Haven Medical System, an Abridge customer. That’s why so many health systems are flocking to make use of them, particularly Abridge. . “It’s one in every of the most well liked products within the AI space in the intervening time,” he told TechCrunch.
As with many administrative things in health tech, in terms of choosing a vendor, an important consideration is price and integration with Epic, an EHR utilized by most large health systems within the US, Schwamm said. Abridge, which supports 14 foreign languages, including Haitian Creole, Brazilian Portuguese and Punjabi, is commonly the winner when health systems are doing head-to-head comparisons with other AI-powered medical scribes, Schwamm said.
Earlier this yr, Abridge gained a right to be integrated inside Epic. After Abridge records a session and a physician stops the recording, “there may be a note in English sitting within Epic waiting for them to quickly confirm, edit and adjust it as they see fit,” Rao said.
While Abridge appears to be ahead of its competitors, which, besides Microsoft-owned Nuance, include Ambiance, Nabla and Suki, Schwamm is just not certain it is going to give you the chance to keep up its lead over the long run.
“The large query is, do you wish a dedicated medical LLM to achieve success on this space?” he asked. “Or will the large foundation models, GPT-4o, Google and Meta, get so good that they might ingest a complete corpus of medical notes and begin to deliver performance that’s similar?”
That line of inquiry shows that these are still early days not only for virtual medical note taking but for many generative AI corporations. The pace of innovation is fast and furious, and today’s winners could easily lose their edge.
“Abridge is ahead by a length, nevertheless it’s early within the race,” Schwamm said, “A horse can get a foul knee and stumble, or it will possibly keep getting further and further ahead.”
For now, most investors TechCrunch talked to agree that Abridge is leading the AI-powered medical scribe competition. Because of this, money has been pouring into the corporate.
In February, Abridge raised a $150 million Series C led by Lightspeed Ventures at a valuation of $850 million.
