Ask any of the health-focused VCs to call one of many high AI startups and one title comes up again and again: 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 widespread Valley vocabulary.
In 2019, Shiv Rao, a practising heart specialist, pitched Andy Weissman, basic companion at Union Sq. Ventures, on a startup concept. Rao referred to 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 a little 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 most recent 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 accomplished it earlier than,” Weissman stated.
However Weissman and different USV companions favored that Rao was not solely a doctor on the College of Pittsburgh Medical Heart 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 high establishments within the nation for engineering and AI analysis.
“[Shiv] had this uncommon mixture of abilities: an entrepreneur with a really formidable imaginative and prescient, with a extremely attention-grabbing workforce,” Weissman stated. “It felt distinctive.”
Abridge additionally had a primary transcription product, which medical doctors may obtain at no cost on their smartphones and begin utilizing throughout their interactions with sufferers. Their utilization shaped the idea of Abridge’s LLM.
Somewhat over 5 years after USV led a $5 million seed spherical into Rao’s startup Abridge, the corporate has grow to be one of the talked about and quickly rising AI-powered healthcare companies.
Though most companies are nonetheless very cautious about adopting AI instruments, massive medical programs are wanting 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 have been in for.” However with a four-year lead on a digital scribe product skilled on hundreds of doctor-patient conversations, and now that AI is booming, hospitals are abruptly shopping for Abridge at a speedy tempo, a stark distinction to their sometimes 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 stated. “College of Chicago, Sutter, Yale, Lee Well being, Christus, Emory and the listing goes on and on,” he stated.
Massive hospitals will not be solely shopping for multi-thousand seat licenses of Abridge however, in lots of circumstances, publishing glowing evaluations 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 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 observe taking appears to be a worthwhile utility of the novel know-how.
Drowning in paperwork
“I’ve received skilled PTSD and battle 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 in addition takes away from your individual 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 file 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, significantly Abridge. . “It is among the hottest merchandise within the AI house in the mean time,” he instructed TechCrunch.
As with many administrative issues in well being tech, in terms of deciding on a vendor, a very powerful consideration is worth and integration with Epic, an EHR utilized by most massive well being programs within the US, Schwamm stated. Abridge, which helps 14 international 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 stated.
Earlier this yr, Abridge gained a proper to be integrated inside Epic. After Abridge data a session and a physician stops the recording, “there’s a observe in English sitting inside Epic ready for them to shortly 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, 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 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 related?”
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 at this time’s winners may simply lose their edge.
“Abridge is forward by a size, nevertheless it’s early within the race,” Schwamm stated, “A horse can get a nasty knee and stumble, or it may 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.
