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 widespread Valley vocabulary.
In 2019, Shiv Rao, a training heart specialist, pitched Andy Weissman, normal companion at Union Sq. Ventures, on a startup thought. Rao known as it SoundCloud plus RapGenius for drugs.
Whereas Weissman thought that evaluating a nascent AI-powered medical word taking app with music internet hosting and lyrics transcription was somewhat humorous, the idea resonated with him.
Rao defined that medical doctors spend as much as two hours a day—usually 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 occupation altogether. Rao satisfied Weissman that the most recent improvements in AI may dramatically cut 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 pretty wacky idea. No one had done it before,” Weissman mentioned.
However Weissman and different USV companions appreciated that Rao was not solely a doctor on the College of Pittsburgh Medical Middle 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 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 rare combination of talents: an entrepreneur with a very ambitious vision, with a really interesting team,” Weissman mentioned. “It felt unique.”
Abridge additionally had a fundamental transcription product, which medical doctors may 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 bit of over 5 years after USV led a $5 million seed spherical into Rao’s startup Abridge, the corporate has change into some of the talked about and quickly rising AI-powered healthcare companies.
Though most companies are nonetheless very cautious about adopting AI instruments, giant medical programs are desperate to signal contracts with Abridge.
“The sales cycle for [health systems] can be 18 to 24 months,” mentioned Rao. “When we started the company, we knew what we were 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 all of a sudden 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 practically each week because the begin of 2024.
“We had built up all this potential energy that turned kinetic almost overnight in January,” Rao mentioned. “University of Chicago, Sutter, Yale, Lee Health, Christus, Emory and the list goes on and on,” he mentioned.
Giant hospitals should not solely shopping for multi-thousand seat licenses of Abridge however, in lots of circumstances, publishing glowing opinions 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 most important paradigm shifts within our careers.”
One of many greatest criticisms of generative AI is that it nonetheless has few substantive enterprise functions. However digital medical word taking appears to be a precious software of the novel expertise.
Drowning in paperwork
“I’ve got professional PTSD and war stories about seeing patients and then having to spend hours and hours at night writing notes and doing all this clerical work that really distracts from the thing that matters most, which is your patient, but also takes away from your own personal life,” Rao mentioned.
With Abridge recording within the background, a doctor can focus completely on the affected person with out having to fret about filling out particular fields within the medical document throughout 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 programs are flocking to make use of them, significantly Abridge. . “It is one of the hottest products in the AI space at the moment,” he instructed TechCrunch.
As with many administrative issues in well being tech, in relation to deciding on a vendor, a very powerful consideration is worth and integration with Epic, an EHR utilized by most giant well being programs within the US, Schwamm mentioned. Abridge, which helps 14 overseas 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 mentioned.
Earlier this yr, Abridge gained a proper to be integrated inside Epic. After Abridge information a session and a health care provider stops the recording, “there is a note in English sitting inside of Epic waiting for them to quickly verify, edit and adjust it as they see fit,” Rao mentioned.
Whereas Abridge seems to be forward of its opponents, which, in addition to Microsoft-owned Nuance, embody Ambiance, Nabla and Suki, Schwamm is just not sure it will likely be in a position to keep its lead over the long run.
“The big question is, do you need a dedicated medical LLM to be successful in this space?” he requested. “Or will the giant foundation models, GPT-4o, Google and Meta, get so good that they could ingest an entire corpus of medical notes and start to deliver performance that’s similar?”
That line of inquiry reveals that these are nonetheless early days not only for digital medical word taking however for many generative AI firms. The tempo of innovation is quick and livid, and as we speak’s winners may simply lose their edge.
“Abridge is ahead by a length, but it’s early in the race,” Schwamm mentioned, “A horse can get a bad knee and stumble, or it can keep getting further and further ahead.”
For now, most traders 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.
