Ask any of the health-focused VCs to call one of many prime AI startups and one identify comes up again and again: an organization primarily based in Pittsburgh referred to as Abridge. And it’s a startup that launched earlier than OpenAI was a family identify and LLMs entered the widespread 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 drugs.
Whereas Weissman thought that evaluating a nascent AI-powered medical notice taking app with music internet hosting and lyrics transcription was a bit of humorous, the idea resonated with him.
Rao defined that medical doctors spend as much as two hours a day—sometimes exterior of normal 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 depart the career altogether. Rao satisfied Weissman that the newest improvements in AI might dramatically scale back the period of time medical doctors 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 fairly wacky thought. Nobody had completed it earlier than,” Weissman mentioned.
However Weissman and different USV companions preferred that Rao was not solely a doctor on the College of Pittsburgh Medical Middle but in addition 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 prime establishments within the nation for engineering and AI analysis.
“[Shiv] had this uncommon mixture of abilities: an entrepreneur with a really formidable imaginative and prescient, with a extremely fascinating group,” Weissman mentioned. “It felt distinctive.”
Abridge additionally had a primary transcription product, which medical doctors might 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.
Slightly over 5 years after USV led a $5 million seed spherical into Rao’s startup Abridge, the corporate has develop into some of the talked about and quickly rising AI-powered healthcare companies.
Though most companies are nonetheless very cautious about adopting AI instruments, giant medical methods are desperate to signal contracts with Abridge.
“The gross sales cycle for [health systems] may be 18 to 24 months,” mentioned 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 skilled on 1000’s of doctor-patient conversations, and now that AI is booming, hospitals are immediately shopping for Abridge at a speedy tempo, a stark distinction to their sometimes protracted buying conduct. The corporate has introduced a brand new well being system buyer practically each week for the reason that begin of 2024.
“We had constructed up all this potential vitality that turned kinetic virtually in a single day in January,” Rao mentioned. “College of Chicago, Sutter, Yale, Lee Well being, Christus, Emory and the checklist goes on and on,” he mentioned.
Massive hospitals usually are not solely shopping for multi-thousand seat licenses of Abridge however, in lots of circumstances, publishing glowing critiques about how the well being tech’s software program is altering physicians’ lives. Hospital executives and medical doctors are describing Abridge as “life-changing,” “magical,” and “some 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 notice taking appears to be a priceless software of the novel know-how.
Drowning in paperwork
“I’ve obtained skilled PTSD and warfare tales about seeing sufferers after which having to spend hours and hours at night time writing notes and doing all this clerical work that basically distracts from the factor that issues most, which is your affected person, but in addition takes away from your individual private life,” Rao mentioned.
With Abridge recording within the background, a doctor can focus totally on the affected person with out having to fret about filling out particular fields within the medical document through 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 methods are flocking to make use of them, significantly Abridge. . “It is likely one of the hottest merchandise within the AI house in the meanwhile,” he advised TechCrunch.
As with many administrative issues in well being tech, with regards to deciding on a vendor, a very powerful consideration is worth and integration with Epic, an EHR utilized by most giant well being methods within the US, Schwamm mentioned. Abridge, which helps 14 international languages, together with Haitian Creole, Brazilian Portuguese and Punjabi, is commonly the winner when well being methods are doing head-to-head comparisons with different AI-powered medical scribes, Schwamm mentioned.
Earlier this yr, Abridge gained a proper to be integrated inside Epic. After Abridge data a session and a health care provider stops the recording, “there’s a notice in English sitting inside Epic ready for them to shortly confirm, edit and alter it as they see match,” Rao mentioned.
Whereas Abridge seems to be forward of its opponents, which, apart from Microsoft-owned Nuance, embody Ambiance, Nabla and Suki, Schwamm just isn’t sure it will likely be capable of 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 large 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 comparable?”
That line of inquiry reveals that these are nonetheless early days not only for digital medical notice taking however for many generative AI corporations. The tempo of innovation is quick and livid, and in the present day’s winners might simply lose their edge.
“Abridge is forward by a size, but it surely’s early within the race,” Schwamm mentioned, “A horse can get a foul knee and stumble, or it may maintain getting additional and additional forward.”
For now, most buyers TechCrunch 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 Collection C led by Lightspeed Ventures at a valuation of $850 million.
