Athenahealth will offer Abridge's ambient clinical documentation solution as part of its growing suite of artificial intelligence tools for small and independent provider practices.
The Abridge ambient scribe solution will be integrated into athenahealth’s Ambient Notes product, which allows small and independent healthcare providers to choose between three different scribe vendors with the purchase of the product.
Athenahealth and Abridge will begin alpha testing in the spring and aim for a scaled rollout of the product by the summer.
Athenahealth launched Ambient Notes in late October with Suki AI and iScribe AI, which will both continue to be available on the platform. Athenahealth said it plans to continue adding ambient scribe partners to its choose-your-player ambient note-taking product.
“We think it creates a whole bunch of optionality,” Paul Brient, chief product officer of athenahealth, said. “It's very unique. I'm not aware of any other organization that's trying to do something like this.”
A single healthcare organization can choose to use multiple different AI scribe providers with athenahealth’s Ambient Notes, depending on each clinician’s preference for the applications. Brient told Fierce Healthcare in October that the choice between ambient AI vendors can be difficult for health systems, and Ambient Notes helps reduce the complexity of decision-making.
“We are constantly evaluating the latest and best technologies on behalf of customers, many of them independent practices and physicians who don’t often have the time or resources to vet or implement new technologies themselves,” Brient said in an email to Fierce. “With Ambient Notes, we can easily plug in new vendors and models as the market continues to evolve.”
Abridge has rapidly grown in popularity over the last year. It deployed with more than 100 health systems in 2024. The partnership with athenahealth will make Abridge available to over 160,000 clinicians at smaller health systems and community health practices, a press release by the organization says.
Abridge was awarded the top place in the 2025 Best in KLAS awards for ambient scribes, beating out Suki AI, Nuance by Microsoft and Nabla. The company announced a $250 million series D raise at the ViVE digital health conference in Nashville, Tennessee, last week. Abridge is now valued at $2.75 billion post-money, Forbes reported.
Abridge also unveiled a new AI tool to streamline clinical and financial workflows at the point of care. The tool was designed to tackle problems with incomplete clinical notes that delay billing processes. Abridge developed what it has dubbed a "contextual reasoning engine" that produces billable notes that support appropriate claims at the point of care, executives said in a press release.
“We are excited to deepen our integration with athenahealth and provide a seamless experience that leads to more clinically useful, compliant, and billable clinical documentation at the point of care,” Shiv Rao, M.D., Abridge founder and CEO, said in a statement. “Streamlining clinical and financial workflows for the many independent practices across the country will allow their clinicians to focus more on patient care.”