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 based mostly in Pittsburgh known as Abridge. And it’s a startup that launched earlier than OpenAI was a family title and LLMs entered the widespread Valley vocabulary.
In 2019, Shiv Rao, a practising heart specialist, pitched Andy Weissman, common companion at Union Sq. Ventures, on a startup concept. Rao known as it SoundCloud plus RapGenius for drugs.
Whereas Weissman thought that evaluating a nascent AI-powered medical be aware taking app with music internet hosting and lyrics transcription was a little bit humorous, the idea resonated with him.
Rao defined that docs 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 career altogether. Rao satisfied Weissman that the most recent improvements in AI might dramatically cut back the period of time docs 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 accomplished it earlier than,” Weissman mentioned.
However Weissman and different USV companions appreciated that Rao was not solely a doctor on the College of Pittsburgh Medical Heart 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 uncommon mixture of skills: 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 docs might obtain free of charge on their smartphones and begin utilizing throughout their interactions with sufferers. Their utilization shaped the idea of Abridge’s LLM.
A little bit over 5 years after USV led a $5 million seed spherical into Rao’s startup Abridge, the corporate has turn out to be probably the most talked about and quickly rising AI-powered healthcare companies.
Though most companies are nonetheless very cautious about adopting AI instruments, massive medical techniques are desirous to signal contracts with Abridge.
“The gross sales cycle for [health systems] might 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 educated 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 conduct. The corporate has introduced a brand new well being system buyer almost each week because the begin of 2024.
“We had constructed up all this potential power that turned kinetic virtually in a single day in January,” Rao mentioned. “College of Chicago, Sutter, Yale, Lee Well being, Christus, Emory and the record 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 docs are describing Abridge as “life-changing,” “magical,” and “probably the most necessary paradigm shifts inside our careers.”
One of many greatest criticisms of generative AI is that it nonetheless has few substantive enterprise purposes. However digital medical be aware taking appears to be a beneficial utility of the novel expertise.
Drowning in paperwork
“I’ve bought 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 additionally takes away from your individual private life,” Rao mentioned.
With Abridge recording within the background, a doctor can focus solely on the affected person with out having to fret about filling out particular fields within the medical file throughout 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 techniques are flocking to make use of them, significantly Abridge. . “It is without doubt one of the hottest merchandise within the AI house for the time being,” he informed TechCrunch.
As with many administrative issues in well being tech, with regards to choosing a vendor, a very powerful consideration is value and integration with Epic, an EHR utilized by most massive well being techniques within the US, Schwamm mentioned. Abridge, which helps 14 overseas languages, together with Haitian Creole, Brazilian Portuguese and Punjabi, is commonly the winner when well being techniques are doing head-to-head comparisons with different AI-powered medical scribes, Schwamm mentioned.
Earlier this 12 months, Abridge gained a proper to be integrated inside Epic. After Abridge information a session and a health care provider stops the recording, “there’s a be aware in English sitting within Epic ready for them to shortly confirm, edit and modify it as they see match,” Rao mentioned.
Whereas Abridge seems to be forward of its rivals, which, in addition to Microsoft-owned Nuance, embody Ambiance, Nabla and Suki, Schwamm isn’t sure it is going to be in a position to preserve its lead over the long run.
“The massive 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 may ingest a complete corpus of medical notes and begin to ship efficiency that’s related?”
That line of inquiry reveals that these are nonetheless early days not only for digital medical be aware taking however for many generative AI corporations. The tempo of innovation is quick and livid, and at the moment’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 could possibly hold getting additional and additional forward.”
For now, most traders 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 Sequence C led by Lightspeed Ventures at a valuation of $850 million.
