Ask any healthcare VC to call one of many high AI startups, and one title comes up time and time once more: Pittsburgh-based Abridge. And this can be a startup that was launched earlier than OpenAI grew to become a family title and Masters entered the valley’s frequent vocabulary.
In 2019, Shiv Rao, a practising heart specialist, pitched the startup concept to Andy Weissman, basic companion at Union Sq. Ventures. Rao known as it SoundCloud plus RapGenius for drugs.
Whereas Weissman thought it was a bit tongue-in-cheek to match a nascent AI-powered medical note-taking app to music internet hosting and textual content transcription, he favored the idea.
Rao defined that docs spend as much as two hours a day – normally exterior of regular workplace hours – typing notes that summarize what was mentioned with their sufferers that day. Such administrative duties burn out docs over time, forcing some to go away the occupation altogether. Rao satisfied Weissman that the most recent improvements in synthetic intelligence may dramatically scale back the time docs spend on ever-increasing paperwork.
This was years earlier than generative AI took the world by storm and captured the creativeness of enterprise capitalists.
“It was a fairly silly concept. Nobody has accomplished this earlier than,” Weissman stated.
However Weisman and different companions at USV favored that Rao was not solely a doctor on the College of Pittsburgh Medical Heart, but in addition spent half his time because the well being system’s company enterprise capitalist, investing in medical know-how startups. Rao’s collaborators and advisors have additionally been alumni and professors at Carnegie Mellon, one of many nation’s main establishments for engineering and synthetic intelligence analysis.
“[Shiv] had such a uncommon mixture of abilities: an entrepreneur with a really bold imaginative and prescient, with a very attention-grabbing staff,” Weisman stated. “It was a novel feeling.”
Abridge additionally had a primary transcription product that docs may obtain without spending a dime to their smartphones and begin utilizing when speaking with sufferers. Their use fashioned the idea of Abridge’s LLM.
A little bit greater than 5 years after USV led a $5 million seed spherical in Rao’s startup Abridge, the corporate has turn into one of the talked about and fastest-growing AI-powered healthcare companies.
Though most companies are nonetheless very cautious about implementing synthetic intelligence instruments, massive well being programs are desirous to signal contracts with Abridge.
“The gross sales cycle for [health systems] could possibly be 18 to 24 months,” Rao stated. “Once we began the corporate, we knew what to anticipate.” However with the product’s four-year benefit over a digital scribe skilled on 1000’s of doctor-patient conversations, and now that synthetic intelligence is booming, hospitals are all of a sudden shopping for Abridge at a speedy tempo, a stark distinction to their normally protracted shopping for habits. The corporate has introduced a brand new well being system shopper practically each week since early 2024.
“We constructed up all this potential power that just about in a single day in January grew to become kinetic,” Rao stated. “College of Chicago, Suttersky, Yale, Lee Hales, Christ, Emory and the checklist goes on,” he stated.
Not solely are main hospitals shopping for multi-thousand-dollar licenses for Abridge, however in lots of instances they’re publishing rave evaluations about how the medical know-how software program is altering docs’ lives. Hospital leaders and docs describe Abridge as “life-changing”, “magical” and “one of the essential paradigm shifts of our profession”.
One of many largest criticisms of generative AI is that it nonetheless has few significant enterprise functions. However digital medical note-keeping seems to be a helpful utility of the brand new know-how.
Drown in papers
“I’ve skilled PTSD and battle tales of seeing sufferers after which having to spend hours and hours at night time writing notes and doing all this clerical work that actually takes away from what’s most essential, which is your affected person, but in addition takes away out of your private life, Rao stated.
With Abridge recording within the background, the physician can absolutely give attention to the affected person with out having to fret about filling out sure fields within the medical document throughout the go to.
The payback of AI-based medical scribes could be very simple to measure, says Dr. Lee Schwam, chief digital well being specialist at Yale New Haven Medical System, an Abridge shopper. That is why so many well being programs are flocking to make use of them, particularly Abridge. . “It is one of many hottest merchandise in AI proper now,” he advised TechCrunch.
As with many administrative issues in well being know-how, in relation to selecting a vendor, a very powerful concerns are value and integration with Epic, the EHR utilized by most massive well being programs within the US, Schwam stated. Abridge, which helps 14 international languages, together with Haitian Creole, Brazilian Portuguese and Punjabi, is usually the winner when well being programs conduct head-to-head comparisons with different AI-powered medical scribes, Schwam stated.
Earlier this yr, Abridge received the best to combine with Epic. After Abridge data the session and the physician stops the recording, “there’s an English notice contained in the Epic ready for them to rapidly evaluation, edit and regulate as they see match,” Rao stated.
Whereas Abridge seems to be forward of its rivals, which along with Microsoft-owned Nuance embrace Ambiance, Nabla and Suki, Schwam is not positive it may preserve its lead in the long term.
“The large query is, do you want a medical-specific LL.M. diploma to reach this house?” he requested. “Or will the enormous mainstream fashions, GPT-4o, Google, and Meta, turn into so good that they’ll swallow a complete corpus of medical notes and begin delivering the identical efficiency?”
This line of inquiry exhibits that it’s nonetheless early days not just for digital medical document protecting, however for many AI firms as effectively. The tempo of innovation is quick and livid, and right now’s winners can simply lose their edge.
“Abridge is a size forward, however early within the race,” Schwam stated, “a horse can get a foul knee and stumble, or it may maintain getting additional and additional forward.”
At this level, most TechCrunch traders agreed that Abridge is main the AI-powered medical scribe race. Because of this, cash is poured into the corporate.
In February, Abridge raised a $150 million Sequence C led by Lightspeed Ventures at a valuation of $850 million.