How Abridge uses generative AI to reduce clinician burnout
Amelia Kinsinger
The tech platform summarizes patient interactions and helps reduce clinicians' administrative burden.
April 16, 2024
It’s no secret that clinicians are burnt out. Following the Covid-19 pandemic, 63% of physicians reported at least one symptom of burnout—up from 38% in 2020, according to data from the American Medical Association—and one of the most prominent causes is the administrative burden physicians face.
Enter Abridge.
Abridge
“Abridge is actually seeking to get rid of the paperwork we do, starting with clinical note documentation, so we can just focus on our patients and do what we were trained to do.”
–Tina Shah, chief clinical officer of Abridge
The health tech startup, which cardiologist Shivdev Rao co-founded in 2018, is trying to solve healthcare’s burnout crisis by using generative artificial intelligence (AI) to automate clinical note-taking, thereby saving clinicians multiple hours per day.
“Over the last couple of decades, we’ve seen things come in between us and our patients [...] and all of a sudden, the most important thing is not at the center,” Tina Shah, chief clinical officer of Abridge, who also works as a pulmonary and critical care physician, told Healthcare Brew. “Abridge is actually seeking to get rid of the paperwork we do, starting with clinical note documentation, so we can just focus on our patients and do what we were trained to do.”
How does it work?
Abridge’s platform is built into electronic health records (EHRs)—including Epic, the largest EHR platform in the US—and allows clinicians to record and summarize interactions with patients.
A provider starts by asking the patient for permission to record their conversation. Once the patient agrees—which, according to Rao, happens the vast majority of the time—the provider hits record on the Abridge platform and then goes about conducting the appointment, all the while being able to stay focused on the patient instead of taking notes.
Abridge
Once the appointment is over, the provider stops the recording, and Abridge uses generative AI to summarize the conversation for both the patient and the provider.
On the patient side, discharge instructions written at a fourth-grade reading level are sent to their patient portal, Rao said.
“There’s great research that patients forget up to 80% of what they’ve heard. We can create this summary that actually improves health literacy and over time, hopefully improves outcomes.”
–Shivdev Rao, co-founder of Abridge
“If you’ve ever gotten a discharge instruction from seeing the doctor, it’s usually totally useless—it doesn’t really reflect what you talked about,” Rao said. “There’s great research that patients forget up to 80% of what they’ve heard. We can create this summary that actually improves health literacy and over time, hopefully improves outcomes.”
If a patient goes to a provider who doesn’t use Abridge, the startup has a consumer app for both iOS and Android that patients can use to record the conversation and receive a summary, Rao added.
Abridge
On the provider side, Abridge creates an after-visit summary that includes the ICD codes for the services the clinician provided during the appointment, and then the summary is sent to the revenue cycle department so the provider can be reimbursed.
It typically takes providers hours every day to write up after-visit summaries, so by using Abridge to do it automatically, the platform can “save doctors up to two to three hours a day,” according to Rao.
Abridge
“Our technology can automate a lot of the clerical work that crushes my soul at night as a cardiologist,” he said.
Health systems like the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in Pennsylvania, the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, the University of California Irvine Health, and Sutter Health in Sacramento use Abridge. Plus, it’s not just for physicians—nurses can use it as well to automate their administrative work, Rao added.
Abridge sells the platform to health systems either on an enterprise basis or on a per-doctor-per-year basis, according to Rao. More than 500,000 patients use Abridge, he said, a number he expects to boom in the next year as more health systems adopt the platform.
“[Health systems] have had the most brutal year economically,” he said. “They have no choice but to actually find technology—now more than ever before. If they can’t find the technology, they are screwed.”
Standing out from the crowd
A number of health tech startups using AI to power clinical note-taking have popped up in recent years, including Ambience Healthcare, Blueprint Health, and Microsoft-owned DAX Copilot.
What sets Abridge apart from the competition, according to Shah, is the fact that the startup employs experts on both the healthcare and AI sides.
“On the AI side, we have a machine learning team, and we have our chief technology officer who’s one of the preeminent healthcare AI experts in the country,” Shah said. “On our side […] our CEO is still a practicing cardiologist […] and we have clinicians sprinkled all the way down into our machine learning teams. I think having that innate knowledge of how healthcare works—because we’re still practicing—and having deep, deep scientific expertise of AI allows us to build something that is really unique.”
The company is also focused on using AI responsibly, Rao said.
Some large language models (LLMs)—a type of AI that can generate text, like ChatGPT—can “hallucinate” information, meaning they make up information that’s not accurate.
“In healthcare, that’s unacceptable,” Rao said.
Abridge has its own LLM, which “mitigates all that risk and can create these notes that are healthcare-grade,” he added.
Future plans
Looking to the future, Abridge plans to use the $150 million it raised in a February Series C round to invest in further research and development and continue iterating and improving the platform, Shah said.
“Our intent is to really provide this urgent need of relief for all clinicians,” Shah said. “That’s what the funding will help us do.”
The eventual goal is to adapt Abridge—which is currently used across 55 specialties and in 14 languages—to work in every clinical specialty, she added.
“I’m in this game because I am a doctor who got burnt out […] I couldn’t practice the medicine I wanted to practice because I was just overloaded with paperwork and low-value work,” Shah said. “I see Abridge not as just an AI company and not just as this tech solution […] that can help with the hard parts of my job, but it is a way to wedge into US healthcare and fundamentally disrupt how we operate today.”