Riverside Health Addresses Clinician Burnout and Sees 11% wRVU Increase and Improved Patient Experience With Abridge
Riverside Health leadership set lofty goals when they implemented Abridge: improve clinician experience and reduce burnout. They also expected Abridge to help the Virginia-based integrated health system generate more complete documentation at the point of care.
But what they didn’t anticipate was a significant improvement in wRVUs, as well as increases in patient experience.
An important insight is that clinicians and health systems are not compensated for the care that they delivered—they’re compensated for the care that they documented that they delivered. Too often, clinicians don’t have the time to fully document the complete set of care provided, which not only impacts the clinical record of the note, but also the ability to get credit for that care.
Abridge addresses this challenge by drafting more complete clinical notes at the point of care, in real time. At Riverside Health, more accurate documentation has contributed to increased revenues and a significant return on investment. Here are a few key takeaways from an analysis Riverside conducted:
- More complete and accurate documentation supported an 11% increase in wRVUs.
- A more precise accounting of care delivered by clinicians—reflected in notes with additional clarity—supported a 14% increase in HCC diagnoses documented per encounter.
- Early analysis already shows significant ROI from Abridge—multiples above the cost of the AI platform.
- Pre- and post-implementation surveys show a 55% reduction in burnout and a 62% reduction in cognitive load.
Financial Impact
To measure these effects, Riverside created a custom Abridge dashboard that tracked everything from the number of clinicians using the platform to coding metrics.
Of the 200 clinicians using Abridge, Riverside performed an analysis on 65 clinicians across specialties who had been using it the longest. It showed that for every dollar that Riverside spent on Abridge, net margin per patient encounter increased by multiples of that investment, based on documentation improvement alone.
“We partnered with Abridge to support our clinicians and improve care for our patients,” said Dr. Charles Frazier, Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Information and Innovation Officer at Riverside Health. “The platform has delivered on that and so much more."
Riverside analyzed 157,000 encounters where evaluation and management (E&M) codes were submitted. The results below stem from Abridge’s capability to better capture level of care provided:
- New Patients: The proportion of encounters coded at level 5 shifted from 8% of visits to 13%, an increase of five percentage points.
- Returning Patients: The proportion of encounters coded at levels 4 and 5 shifted up by four percentage points and one percentage point, respectively.
“These changes impact our ability to accurately bill for the care we provide, resulting in significant increases in both revenue and net margins while enabling us to offer a better patient experience,” said Dr. Frazier.
Based on the more-complete documentation drafted by Abridge, Riverside observed a 14% increase in documenting more accurate and specific diagnoses, as well as appropriate HCC capture per encounter. Clinicians who used Abridge also experienced an 11% boost in wRVUs. These results were observed in an ambulatory setting across many different specialties, and the team will continue to monitor the impact as Abridge is scaled to more clinicians. Dr. Frazier is leveraging these results to support his view that investing in clinician wellbeing and patient experience will also pay financial dividends.
“We’re a smaller system, so we need to understand the effect of every dollar spent on technology,” said Dr. Frazier. Riverside has over 700 physicians and advanced practice providers across a variety of specialties and care settings.
Clinician Experience and Patient Impact
According to Dr. Frazier, Riverside did not implement Abridge to save money; the goal was to improve clinician experience. Using pre- and post-implementation surveys to measure changes in clinician experience, Riverside observed:
- 55% reduction in burnout
- 62% reduction in cognitive load
In addition to quantitative data, Dr. Frazier has received dozens of notes from clinicians with their candid feedback about Abridge:
“Typically on my clinic day, I would stay until 7 p.m. to finish my notes, but now I’m signing the last note 30 minutes after seeing my last patient.”
“I was ready to retire—overwhelmed with chart prep and management. Abridge has been a game-changer for me.”
“Abridge has significantly reduced note-writing stressors for acute visits.”
“It is comforting knowing I have the transcript as a backup if I forget certain details of the visits.”
Beyond clinician wellbeing, Riverside also found that Abridge usage led to improved patient experience. Using Press Ganey patient surveys, Riverside observed a nearly three percentage point increase in “top box” scores for patient experience. According to medical informaticists, interventions that generate half-percentage point increases in Press Ganey survey results are considered successful.
“Nobody becomes a doctor to make money,” said Dr. Frazier. “At the same time, Riverside needs to be financially successful to enable us to deliver the best patient care possible—and Abridge is empowering us to do just that.”
Healthcare delivery is fundamentally an interaction between people—clinicians and patients, who both have real, human needs at the point of care. That’s why Abridge is committed to delivering technology that sustainably restores joy, precision, and human connection to the frontlines of medicine.
Note: All statistics and metrics presented in this article were provided by Riverside Health and not independently verified by Abridge.
