Ask any health VC to call one of the top AI startups, and one name will come up over and once again: Pittsburgh-based Abridge. This is a startup that was born before OpenAI became a household name and LLM corporations entered the common Valley lexicon.
In 2019, Shiv Rao, a practicing cardiologist, proposed a startup idea to Andy Weissman, general partner of Union Square Ventures. Rao called it SoundCloud plus RapGenius in reference to medicine.
Although Weissman found it a bit funny to match an emerging AI-based medical notes app to music hosting and lyrics transcription, he liked the concept.
Rao explained that doctors spend as much as two hours a day – normally outside normal working hours – writing notes summarizing what was discussed with patients that day. Such administrative tasks have been causing physician burnout for years, with some leaving the career altogether. Rao convinced Weissman that the latest innovations in artificial intelligence could dramatically reduce the time doctors spend on an ever-increasing number of documents.
It took many years for generative AI to take the world by storm and capture the imagination of VC investors.
“It was quite a crazy idea. No one has ever done this before,” Weissman said.
Weissman and other USV partners liked that Rao was not only a physician at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, but also spent half of his time as a corporate enterprise capitalist for that health care system, investing in health technology startups. Rao’s staff and advisors were also graduates and professors at Carnegie Mellon, one of the nation’s leading institutions for artificial intelligence engineering and research.
“[Shiv] “he had that rare combination of talents: an entrepreneur with a very ambitious vision and a really interesting team,” Weissman said. “I felt special.”
Abridge also had a basic transcription product that physicians could download for free to their smartphones and start using with their patients. Their use formed the basis of Abridge’s LLM.
Just over five years after USV committed $5 million to Rao’s startup Abridge, the company has develop into one of the most talked about and rapidly growing AI healthcare corporations.
While most corporations are still very cautious about implementing AI tools, large medical systems are desirous to sign contracts with Abridge.
“Sales cycle for [health systems] could be 18 to 24 months,” Rao said. “When we started the company, we knew what we were getting into.” But with a four-year head start on the product, a virtual scribe trained from 1000’s of doctor-patient conversations, and now that artificial intelligence is booming, hospitals are suddenly buying Abridge at a rapid pace, a stark contrast to their typically protracted purchasing behavior. Starting in early 2024, the company will announce a recent healthcare client almost every week.
“We accumulated all this potential energy, which turned into kinetic energy almost overnight in January,” Rao said. “University of Chicago, Sutter, Yale, Lee Health, Christus, Emory and the list goes on,” he said.
Large hospitals not only buy multi-thousand-dollar Abridge licenses, but in many cases publish favorable reviews about how medical technology software changes the lives of doctors. Hospital executives and physicians describe Abridge as “life changing“, “Magic“And”one of the most necessary paradigm shifts in our careers“
One of the biggest criticisms of generative AI is that it still has few significant business applications. However, virtual medical note taking appears to be a worthwhile application of recent technology.
Drowning in papers
“I have PTSD stories and war stories of seeing patients and then having to spend hours at night writing notes and doing all this office work that really distracts from what’s most important, which is the patient, but also takes away from from your personal life,” Rao said.
With Abridge recording in the background, the doctor can fully focus on the patient without having to fret about filling out specific fields in the medical record during the visit.
He says that the reimbursement of doctors using artificial intelligence is very easy to measure Dr. Lee Sponge, director of digital health at Yale New Haven Medical System, an Abridge client. That’s why so many health systems, especially Abridge, are desirous to use them. . “It’s one of the hottest products in the AI space right now,” he told TechCrunch.
As with many administrative issues in health technology, when it comes to picking a vendor, the most necessary considerations are price and integration with Epic, the EHR system used by most large health care systems in the U.S., Schwamm said. Abridge, which supports 14 foreign languages including Haitian Creole, Brazilian Portuguese and Punjabi, often wins when health systems make head-to-head comparisons with other AI-based medical professionals, Schwamm said.
At the starting of this 12 months, Abridge obtained the right to be, among others,integrated with Epic. After Abridge records a session and the doctor stops recording, “there is a note in Epic in English waiting for you to quickly review, edit and customize as you see fit,” Rao said.
While Abridge appears to be ahead of its competitors, which in addition to Microsoft-owned Nuance include Ambiance, Nabla and Suki, Schwamm is unsure it should have the opportunity to take care of its advantage in the long run.
“The big question is: do you need a dedicated medical LLM to succeed in this space?” he asked. “Or will the core models of the giants GPT-4o, Google and Meta become so good that they can process the entire corpus of medical notes and start delivering similar performance?”
This line of research shows that it’s still early days not only for virtual medical notes, but for most generative AI corporations. The pace of innovation is fast and furious, and today’s winners can easily lose their edge.
“Abridge has a significant lead, but it’s still early in the race,” Schwamm said. “The horse may injure its knee and stumble, or it may be further and further forward.”
For now, most investors TechCrunch spoke to agree that Abridge is running a competition for artificial intelligence medical writers. Because of this, money flows into the company.
In February, Abridge raised $150 million in a Series C round led by Lightspeed Ventures at a valuation of $850 million.