Ask any of the health-focused VCs to call one of many prime 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 practising heart specialist, pitched Andy Weissman, normal companion 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 be aware taking app with music internet hosting and lyrics transcription was a bit humorous, the idea resonated with him.
Rao defined that medical doctors spend as much as two hours a day—sometimes outdoors 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 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 pretty wacky idea. No one had done it before,” Weissman mentioned.
However Weissman and different USV companions preferred 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 prime establishments within the nation for engineering and AI analysis.
“[Shiv] had this rare combination of talents: an entrepreneur with a very ambitious vision, with a really interesting team,” Weissman mentioned. “It felt unique.”
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 fashioned the premise of Abridge’s LLM.
Somewhat over 5 years after USV led a $5 million seed spherical into Rao’s startup Abridge, the corporate has turn into one of the crucial talked about and quickly rising AI-powered healthcare companies.
Though most companies are nonetheless very cautious about adopting AI instruments, giant medical programs are wanting to signal contracts with Abridge.
“The sales cycle for [health systems] can be 18 to 24 months,” mentioned Rao. “When we started the company, we knew what we were in for.” However with a four-year lead on a digital scribe product educated on hundreds of doctor-patient conversations, and now that AI is booming, hospitals are all of a sudden shopping for Abridge at a fast tempo, a stark distinction to their sometimes protracted buying habits. The corporate has introduced a brand new well being system buyer practically each week because the begin of 2024.
“We had built up all this potential energy that turned kinetic almost overnight in January,” Rao mentioned. “University of Chicago, Sutter, Yale, Lee Health, Christus, Emory and the list goes on and on,” he mentioned.
Massive hospitals usually are not solely shopping for multi-thousand seat licenses of Abridge however, in lots of instances, publishing glowing opinions 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 “one of the most important paradigm shifts within our careers.”
One of many greatest criticisms of generative AI is that it nonetheless has few substantive enterprise functions. However digital medical be aware taking appears to be a beneficial software of the novel expertise.
Drowning in paperwork
“I’ve got professional PTSD and war stories about seeing patients and then having to spend hours and hours at night writing notes and doing all this clerical work that really distracts from the thing that matters most, which is your patient, but also takes away from your own personal 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 in the course of the go to.
The payback of AI-powered medical scribes are very simple 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, notably Abridge. . “It is one of the hottest products in the AI space at the moment,” he instructed TechCrunch.
As with many administrative issues in well being tech, in the case of choosing a vendor, an important consideration is value and integration with Epic, an EHR utilized by most giant well being programs within the US, Schwamm mentioned. 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 mentioned.
Earlier this 12 months, Abridge gained a proper to be built-in inside Epic. After Abridge information a session and a health care provider stops the recording, “there is a note in English sitting inside of Epic waiting for them to quickly verify, edit and adjust it as they see fit,” Rao mentioned.
Whereas Abridge seems to be forward of its rivals, which, moreover Microsoft-owned Nuance, embody Ambiance, Nabla and Suki, Schwamm shouldn’t be sure it is going to be capable of preserve its lead over the long run.
“The big question is, do you need a dedicated medical LLM to be successful in this space?” he requested. “Or will the giant foundation models, GPT-4o, Google and Meta, get so good that they could ingest an entire corpus of medical notes and start to deliver performance that’s similar?”
That line of inquiry exhibits that these are nonetheless early days not only for digital medical be aware taking however for many generative AI firms. The tempo of innovation is quick and livid, and at present’s winners might simply lose their edge.
“Abridge is ahead by a length, but it’s early in the race,” Schwamm mentioned, “A horse can get a bad knee and stumble, or it can keep getting further and further ahead.”
For now, most buyers TechCrunch talked to agree that Abridge is main the AI-powered medical scribe competitors. Because of this, 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.
