Ask any of the healthcare-focused venture capitalists to name a top AI startup and one name will come up again and again: a Pittsburgh-based company called Abridge. And it’s a startup that launched before OpenAI was a household name and LLMs entered the Valley’s common vocabulary.
In 2019, Shiv Rao, a practicing cardiologist, approached Andy Weissman, general partner at Union Square Ventures, with a startup idea. Rao called it SoundCloud plus RapGenius for medicine.
While Weissman thought comparing a nascent AI-powered medical note-taking app to music hosting and lyric transcription was a little funny, the concept resonated with him.
Rao explained that doctors spend up to two hours a day (usually outside of regular work hours) writing notes summarizing what was discussed with their patients that day. These administrative tasks have caused physician burnout for years, leading some to leave the profession altogether. Rao convinced Weissman that the latest innovations in AI could dramatically reduce the amount of time doctors spend on the growing burden of paperwork.
This was years before generative AI took over the world and captured the imagination of venture capitalists.
“It was a pretty crazy idea. Nobody had done it before,” Weissman said.
But Weissman and other USV partners liked that Rao was not only a doctor at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, but also spent half his time as a corporate venture capitalist for that health system, investing in startups. of health technology. Rao’s employees and advisors were also graduates and professors of Carnegie Mellon, one of the country’s leading institutions for engineering and artificial intelligence research.
“[Shiv] He had this rare combination of talents: an entrepreneur with a very ambitious vision, with a really interesting team,” Weissman said. “He felt unique.”
Abridge also had a basic transcription product, which doctors could download for free on their smartphones and start using during their interactions with patients. Its use formed the basis of Abridge’s LLM.
Just over five years after USV led a $5 million seed round in Rao’s startup Abridge, the company has become one of the most talked about and fast-growing AI-powered healthcare companies .
Although most corporations are still very cautious when adopting AI toolsLarge medical systems are eager to sign contracts with Abridge.
“The sales cycle of [health systems] it may be 18 to 24 months,” Rao said. “When we founded the company, we knew what awaited us.” But with a four-year head start on a virtual scribe product trained on thousands of doctor-patient conversations, and now that AI is booming, hospitals are suddenly buying Abridge at a rapid pace, a stark contrast to their previous behavior. typically prolonged purchase. The company has announced a new health system customer almost every week since the beginning of 2024.
“We had built up all this potential energy that became kinetic almost overnight in January,” Rao said. “University of Chicago, Sutter, Yale, Lee Health, Christus, Emory and the list goes on and on,” he said.
Large hospitals are not only purchasing Abridge licenses for thousands of positions but, in many cases, publishing glowing reviews about how health technology software is changing doctors’ lives. Hospital executives and doctors describe Abridge as “that changes life“, “magical,” and “One of the most important paradigm shifts in our careers..”
One of the biggest criticisms of generative AI is that it still has few substantial commercial applications. But virtual medical note taking appears to be a valuable application of this novel technology.
Drowning in paperwork
“I have professional PTSD and war stories about seeing patients and then having to spend hours and hours at night writing notes and doing all this administrative work that really distracts from what matters most, which is your patient, but it also takes away from your own personal life,” Rao said.
With Abridge recording in the background, a doctor can focus completely on the patient without having to worry about completing specific fields in the medical record during the visit.
Profitability of AI-powered medical scribes is very easy to measure, claims Dr. Lee Schwamm, director of digital health at Yale New Haven Medical System, an Abridge customer. That’s why so many health systems are flocking to use them, particularly Abridge. . “It’s one of the hottest products in the AI space right now,” he told TechCrunch.
As with many administrative aspects in health technology, when it comes to selecting a vendor, the most important consideration is price and integration with Epic, an EHR used by most large health systems in the US. ., said Schwamm. Abridge, which supports 14 foreign languages, including Haitian Creole, Brazilian Portuguese and Punjabi, is often the winner when health systems make head-to-head comparisons with other AI-powered medical scribes, Schwamm said.
Earlier this year, Abridge won the right to be meIntegrated within Epic.. After Abridge records a session and a doctor stops the recording, “there’s a note in English inside Epic waiting for you to quickly check, edit and adjust it as you see fit,” Rao said.
While Abridge appears to be ahead of its competitors, which, in addition to Microsoft-owned Nuance, include Atmosphere, Nabla and sukiSchwamm is not sure he can maintain his leadership in the long term.
“The big question is: do you need a dedicated medical LLM to be successful in this space?” she asked. “Or will the giant baseline models, GPT-4o, Google and Meta, be so good that they could absorb an entire corpus of medical notes and start delivering similar performance?”
That line of research shows that we are still in the early days not only for virtual medical note taking but also for most generative AI companies. The pace of innovation is fast and furious, and today’s winners could easily lose their advantage.
“Abridge is ahead by a length, but it’s early in the race,” Schwamm said, “a horse can suffer a knee injury and stumble, or he can keep getting further and further ahead.”
For now, most investors TechCrunch spoke to agree that Abridge is leading the AI-powered medical scribe competition. For this reason, money has been pouring into the company.
In February, Abridge raised a $150 million Series C led by Lightspeed Ventures at a valuation of $850 million.