Ask any of the health-focused VCs to call one of many prime AI startups and one identify 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 identify and LLMs entered the frequent Valley vocabulary.
In 2019, Shiv Rao, a practising heart specialist, pitched Andy Weissman, common accomplice at Union Sq. Ventures, on a startup concept. Rao referred to as it SoundCloud plus RapGenius for drugs.
Whereas Weissman thought that evaluating a nascent AI-powered medical observe taking app with music internet hosting and lyrics transcription was just a little humorous, the idea resonated with him.
Rao defined that medical doctors spend as much as two hours a day—usually exterior 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 occupation altogether. Rao satisfied Weissman that the newest improvements in AI may 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 concept. Nobody had performed 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 bold imaginative and prescient, with a very attention-grabbing crew,” Weissman mentioned. “It felt distinctive.”
Abridge additionally had a fundamental transcription product, which medical doctors may obtain without cost on their smartphones and begin utilizing throughout their interactions with sufferers. Their utilization fashioned the idea of Abridge’s LLM.
Just a little over 5 years after USV led a $5 million seed spherical into Rao’s startup Abridge, the corporate has grow to be probably the most talked about and quickly rising AI-powered healthcare companies.
Though most firms are nonetheless very cautious about adopting AI instruments, giant medical programs are wanting to signal contracts with Abridge.
“The gross sales cycle for [health systems] could 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 out of the blue shopping for Abridge at a fast tempo, a stark distinction to their usually protracted buying habits. 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 listing goes on and on,” he mentioned.
Massive hospitals are usually 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 “probably the most 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 observe taking appears to be a priceless utility of the novel expertise.
Drowning in paperwork
“I’ve received skilled PTSD and struggle tales about seeing sufferers after which having to spend hours and hours at evening writing notes and doing all this clerical work that actually 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 report 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 programs are flocking to make use of them, notably Abridge. . “It is likely one of the hottest merchandise within the AI house in the mean time,” he informed TechCrunch.
As with many administrative issues in well being tech, relating to choosing a vendor, an important consideration is worth and integration with Epic, an EHR utilized by most giant well being programs 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 programs 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 information a session and a physician stops the recording, “there’s a observe in English sitting within Epic ready for them to rapidly confirm, edit and modify it as they see match,” Rao mentioned.
Whereas Abridge seems to be forward of its opponents, which, apart from Microsoft-owned Nuance, embrace Ambiance, Nabla and Suki, Schwamm isn’t sure it is going to be capable of keep 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 enormous 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 observe taking however for many generative AI firms. The tempo of innovation is quick and livid, and at the moment’s winners may 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 possibly hold getting additional and additional forward.”
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.
