Ask any of the health-focused VCs to call one of many high 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 frequent Valley vocabulary.
In 2019, Shiv Rao, a working towards heart specialist, pitched Andy Weissman, common accomplice at Union Sq. Ventures, on a startup concept. Rao known as it SoundCloud plus RapGenius for medication.
Whereas Weissman thought that evaluating a nascent AI-powered medical observe taking app with music internet hosting and lyrics transcription was somewhat 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 go away the career altogether. Rao satisfied Weissman that the most recent improvements in AI may dramatically scale 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 reasonably wacky concept. Nobody had finished it earlier than,” Weissman stated.
However Weissman and different USV companions preferred 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 workers and advisers had been additionally graduates and professors at Carnegie Mellon, one of many high 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 extremely attention-grabbing staff,” Weissman stated. “It felt distinctive.”
Abridge additionally had a fundamental transcription product, which docs may obtain free of charge 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 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 methods are desperate to signal contracts with Abridge.
“The gross sales cycle for [health systems] could be 18 to 24 months,” stated Rao. “Once we began the corporate, we knew what we had 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 conduct. The corporate has introduced a brand new well being system buyer almost each week for the reason that begin of 2024.
“We had constructed up all this potential vitality that turned kinetic nearly in a single day in January,” Rao stated. “College of Chicago, Sutter, Yale, Lee Well being, Christus, Emory and the checklist goes on and on,” he stated.
Massive hospitals aren’t solely shopping for multi-thousand seat licenses of Abridge however, in lots of instances, 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 largest criticisms of generative AI is that it nonetheless has few substantive enterprise purposes. However digital medical observe taking appears to be a beneficial software of the novel know-how.
Drowning in paperwork
“I’ve acquired 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 actually distracts from the factor that issues most, which is your affected person, but additionally takes away from your personal private life,” Rao stated.
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 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 methods are flocking to make use of them, significantly Abridge. . “It is without doubt one of the hottest merchandise within the AI area in the mean time,” he instructed TechCrunch.
As with many administrative issues in well being tech, on the subject of choosing a vendor, a very powerful consideration is value and integration with Epic, an EHR utilized by most giant well being methods within the US, Schwamm stated. Abridge, which helps 14 overseas languages, together with Haitian Creole, Brazilian Portuguese and Punjabi, is usually the winner when well being methods are doing head-to-head comparisons with different AI-powered medical scribes, Schwamm stated.
Earlier this yr, Abridge gained a proper to be built-in inside Epic. After Abridge data 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 regulate it as they see match,” Rao stated.
Whereas Abridge seems to be forward of its rivals, which, in addition to Microsoft-owned Nuance, embrace Ambiance, Nabla and Suki, Schwamm isn’t sure it will likely be in a position to keep its lead over the long run.
“The massive query is, do you want a devoted medical LLM to achieve success on this area?” 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 comparable?”
That line of inquiry reveals that these are nonetheless early days not only for digital medical observe taking however for many generative AI corporations. The tempo of innovation is quick and livid, and right this moment’s winners may simply lose their edge.
“Abridge is forward by a size, but it surely’s early within the race,” Schwamm stated, “A horse can get a foul knee and stumble, or it might 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 Collection C led by Lightspeed Ventures at a valuation of $850 million.
