A Year of Abridge, In Summary

As 2023 draws to a close, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on everything we have accomplished with our amazing community of partners, clinicians, and patients. The entire team at Abridge is grateful for the collaboration in helping us build a solution that addresses this historic moment in healthcare, a time when provider burnout and staffing shortages continue to challenge our health systems every day.

Raised $30M in Series B Funding and Built Mission-driven Partnerships

In October, we were proud to announce that we secured $30M in Series B funding led by Spark Capital. The round also included existing investor Bessemer Venture Partners, as well as several leading healthcare innovators including CVS Health Ventures, Kaiser Permanente Ventures, Lifepoint Health, Mayo Clinic, SCAN Group, UC Investments (University of California), and the American College of Cardiology. This funding opened doors to a whole new chapter of our growth, dramatically accelerating our ability to advance our mission and technology. 

We partnered with The University of Kansas Health System, and together, we were the first to announce an at-scale deployment of generative AI for clinical documentation. Additionally, we entered into an enterprise-wide agreement with Emory Healthcare. In an industry-first, we became Epic’s first Pal, which has allowed us access to deeply integrate the Abridge solution natively within Epic’s workflows. We are grateful for the continual feedback and insights from our community that guide our development, ensuring our solutions resonate with the needs of clinicians across a variety of care settings.

Grew Our Leadership Team

This year, we welcomed Zachary Lipton as our Chief Science Officer and Chief Technology Officer and Tina Shah as our Chief Clinical Officer. Zachary Lipton, an experienced AI leader, heads our scientific research and machine learning efforts. He's an Assistant Professor of Machine Learning at Carnegie Mellon, directing the ACMI lab, focusing on the theoretical and engineering foundations of robust and adaptive machine learning algorithms, applications to both prediction and decision-making problems in clinical medicine, natural language processing, and the impact of machine learning systems on society. As a widely published AI expert, he founded the Approximately Correct blog and co-authored the interactive open-source book "Dive Into Deep Learning." Recently addressing the US Senate’s AI Insight Forum, his pioneering work in applying AI to healthcare data is noteworthy, and his strong commitment to building trust and mitigating bias in AI models aligns with our commitment to ethical AI practices.

Dr. Shah, former Senior Advisor for the Office of the U.S. Surgeon General, and a practicing pulmonary and critical care physician, brings with her an extensive background in addressing clinician burnout and healthcare policy. She has a deep understanding of the clinical landscape and proven track record in shaping policy, which has made her an invaluable asset in ensuring our technology aligns with the needs of healthcare professionals at every level.

Launched Groundbreaking Features to Make Documentation Even Easier

In 2023, we launched several innovative product features that were the first of their kind in the generative AI for healthcare category. From Linked Evidence and multilingual capabilities to Physical Exam support and Multi-patient Recordings—this past year was all about making AI-generated notes more transparent and efficient than ever. Here’s a deeper look:

Linked Evidence

Abridge is the only solution with built-in auditability for trust and verification.  Linked Evidence helps you view the origin of particular AI summaries so you can see the source of truth. When you highlight the relevant auto-generated summary in your Abridge clinical note, you can view the evidence from the transcripts as well as replay the corresponding audio.

Multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)

Our state-of-the-art proprietary speech recognition model is trained on hundreds of thousands of hours of speech content (across 30+ languages) and fine-tuned on thousands of hours of de-identified medical conversations. Because our automatic ASR model is developed in-house, we have the capability to regularly improve the model to account for shifting trends in medicine, adding new lexicon, and improving robustness for unique accents and speech patterns. 

Today, Abridge can already support medical conversations in Spanish, Chinese (Mandarin), Chinese (Cantonese), Tagalog, Vietnamese, Arabic, French, Korean Russian, Haitian Creole, and German, outputting a fully English note at the end.

Physical Exams

With our support for Physical Exams, you can now automatically integrate physical exam findings into your Abridge clinical note. Clinicians across all healthcare specialties can capture positive and negative findings from 16 key systems by verbalizing each system during the patient visit (vitals, general, HEENT, neck, cardiovascular, pulmonary, breast, abdominal, pelvic, genitourinary, rectal, extremities, skin, lymphatic, neurologic, and psychiatric).

Here's an example of a patient's physical exam for onset of headaches, seamlessly embedded into the Abridge clinical note. It encompasses all four systems verbalized by the physician during the examination.

Multi-patient Recordings

Our recordings now offer workflow flexibility, enabling clinicians to record and pause as many times as needed per patient, allowing for seamless transitions between seeing patients and charting tasks and still outputting a single summarized note at the end of many conversations.

Gender Pronouns

To accurately reflect and respect patients' identities, we've implemented a feature for including and modifying patients' gender pronouns in clinical notes. This addition enables healthcare professionals to easily choose she/her, he/him, or they/them pronouns when disclosed.

Real-world Impact From Our Clinician Partners

Clinicians are at the heart of everything we do and we learned from many who use Abridge day in and day out. Here are just a few of our favorite quotes:

What’s Next in 2024

2023 inspired us and took us to incredible new levels of growth and impact. And yet—this is just the beginning. We have ambitious goals for 2024. We’ll build deeper integrations with Epic that will make using Abridge even more seamless and easier than ever before, and expand our use cases and partnerships. Most importantly, we’ll continue to improve our AI-generated clinical notes across all healthcare specialties so that clinicians can spend time and mental energy on what matters most—their patients. 

Thank you for all of your support and dedication, we can’t wait to continue to build together in 2024!