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 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 drugs.
Whereas Weissman thought that evaluating a nascent AI-powered medical be aware taking app with music internet hosting and lyrics transcription was just a little humorous, the idea resonated with him.
Rao defined that docs spend as much as two hours a day—usually outdoors of normal 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 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 executed it earlier than,” Weissman stated.
However Weissman and different USV companions appreciated 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 workers and advisers had 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 bold imaginative and prescient, with a very attention-grabbing group,” Weissman stated. “It felt distinctive.”
Abridge additionally had a fundamental transcription product, which docs may obtain at no cost on their smartphones and begin utilizing throughout their interactions with sufferers. Their utilization fashioned the premise 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 one of the crucial 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,” 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 hundreds of doctor-patient conversations, and now that AI is booming, hospitals are abruptly 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 power that turned kinetic nearly in a single day in January,” Rao stated. “College of Chicago, Sutter, Yale, Lee Well being, Christus, Emory and the record goes on and on,” he stated.
Giant hospitals should not 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 “one of the crucial essential 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 helpful 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 evening 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 personal private life,” Rao stated.
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 document 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 likely one of the hottest merchandise within the AI area in the mean time,” he informed TechCrunch.
As with many administrative issues in well being tech, in the case of 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 stated. Abridge, which helps 14 overseas 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 stated.
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 be aware 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 opponents, which, in addition to Microsoft-owned Nuance, embody Ambiance, Nabla and Suki, Schwamm just isn’t sure will probably 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 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 exhibits that these are nonetheless early days not only for digital medical be aware taking however for many generative AI firms. The tempo of innovation is quick and livid, and right now’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 foul knee and stumble, or it might probably maintain 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.
