Since April, more than 300 enterprise health systems have adopted Abridge's artificial intelligence-based decision support solution, and the company is now making the tool available to every clinician at its partner health systems.
It's part of Abridge's strategy to broadly expand from AI documentation to functioning as an enterprise AI assistant for clinicians.
“Adoption of decision support has outpaced anything we've shipped before because it feels like a natural extension of Abridge. It understands the context of the patient in front of the clinician, it's grounded in the evidence they already trust, and it connects to what they want to do next," Shiv Rao, M.D., CEO and co-founder of Abridge, and a practicing cardiologist, said in a statement.
Monthly active users of the CDS solution have grown to more than half of eligible Abridge clinicians, and queries per clinician have tripled in the last two months, the company said.
With competition in the clinical AI market heating up, Abridge is betting on its enterprise relationship with hundreds of health systems to spur growth of its CDS solution. Those 300 enterprise health systems serve over 250 million patients.
Abridge says health systems can deploy its clinical intelligence agent through the same enterprise-approved infrastructure already used for its ambient documentation tools, including existing security, governance and electronic health record integrations.
For clinicians who use Abridge as an AI scribe, the agent is already part of the workflow. For every other clinician at the organization, it arrives as a new AI assistant experience on mobile and desktop, Abridge said.
Abridge announced in early April it was scaling up its clinical decision support solution through a partnership with Wolters Kluwer's UpToDate, a clinical evidence solution that's been on the market for 30 years. Abridge worked with Wolters Kluwer to integrate context-aware clinical decision support within the ambient documentation workflow to make it easier for clinicians to access evidence-based answers at the point of conversation.
Abridge also has content integrations with The New England Journal of Medicine, the JAMA Network, the American Diabetes Association, the American Academy of Family Physicians, Neurology, the Journal of Clinical Oncology and other medical literature.
"In many ways, Abridge really was pushing the envelope with clinical decision support—that there is an opportunity to not just be a passive listener to what's going on between the physician and the patient, but also to actually be an assistant along the way," Eric Poon, M.D., Chief Health Information Officer at Duke Health, told Fierce Healthcare.
Health systems that have adopted Abridge's CDS solution include Kaiser Permanente, Sutter Health, UNC Health, CHRISTUS Health, Duke Health and UPMC.
Clinicians at Duke Health have used Abridge's CDS solution to manage cases as different as a rare neurologic presentation and an unusual facial rash by recognizing the clinical context, surfacing relevant guidance in real time and supporting the next best action, according to Poon, who is an adult primary care physician.
"As a user of that new feature, I have found it to be incredibly and surprisingly helpful because, for once, I actually have a digital assistant that is just quietly and unobtrusively listening in the background. Maybe, most of the time, I don't end up using it, but boy, when I actually have a question and the question is already teed up for me, it's magical," Poon said in an interview. "It's like having an English butler at my side, anticipating my needs."
During an appointment with a patient with a rare neurological condition, Poon said the CDS solution acted as a proactive digital assistant that quickly surfaced relevant guidance so he could continue speaking with the patient without searching external resources.
“It really was able to help me practice at the top of my license, and it made me feel that I was able to really address the patient's needs and apply my critical thinking," Poon said. About 2,000 clinicians at Duke Health are currently using Abridge.
"This really feels like a pivotal moment," Matt Troup, physician assistant certified (PA-C) and Abridge's head of clinical strategy, said in an interview. "You're starting to see what the impact is of having this mountain of knowledge shaped to the patient in front of me, readily available to me at any time in my workflow, and the idea for Abridge is how do we bring this to as many clinicians as possible within the organizations we partner with."
As a practicing clinician, Troup recalled feeling a certain dread that he was missing something during patient visits. "I never had enough time to sit in that room or process the information that was presented to me. I always felt rushed. I always felt like there was maybe another article I should have read, one more case study, one more search that I should have searched in another medical reference database, and that compounds over time. That feeling like maybe I'm not doing the best for the patient, for the human in the room. That's why I get so excited about what we've built because now clinicians can feel like the superhero in the room," he noted.
Abridge's technology is currently deployed across more than 300 health systems, supporting over 100 million clinical conversations annually. The company "built trust at scale" by first deploying AI to alleviate documentation burden, Troup noted.
"We believe that we've earned the right to put decision support in every clinician's hands because we believe health systems trust us to protect what's shared in that room. By having that trust and going through governance to bring AI into these workflows, now we want to turn this on for every clinician at every health system to have the power of this decision support in the workflow," Troup said.
The company is pitching the tool as a secure, enterprise-approved alternative to "shadow AI," giving health systems confidence that clinicians can use patient-specific AI support within approved workflows.
IT leaders at partner health systems see the benefit of an enterprise approach that offers a level of control and governance. Clinical informatics leaders see the value of an AI tool that's easy to use, embedded in the workflow and provides personalized clinical guidance and treatment information when clinicians need it.
UPMC rolled out Abridge's CDS enterprise-wide so every clinician has access to the solution, according to Robert Bart, M.D., chief medical information officer at UPMC Health Services Division.
"More than 60% of our Abridge users have adopted it largely through self-discovery, with no additional training or campaign behind it. This only happens when the tool is embedded in the workflow, not adjacent, requiring extra steps to invoke or use. The more clinicians use it, the more it reinforces itself," Bart said.
"I would say the biggest, jaw-dropping feature has been the integration with clinical decision support. That's something our clinicians have been amazed by. They're discussing a complex patient, and right there within the workflow are relevant prompts they can immediately use. It's not interruptive. It's simply there when you need it," said Tim Barker, chief medical information officer at CHRISTUS Health.
Abridge plans to continue to refine the CDS solution based on health system feedback. "That feedback loop is so critical, both in terms of validating the quality of the responses that we create, but also that all the responses we create have impact in terms of the decision-making for that clinician," Troup said.
Abridge launched into the healthcare market eight years ago as an A scribe, but the company has been steadily building out its tech to function more like an AI assistant across clinical workflows.
At an event in June, Abridge announced a major platform expansion to integrate payer and life sciences workflows. Described as an "AI-native clinician intelligence platform," Abridge says it now connects care delivery, payment and evidence-based treatment. Earlier this month, the company rolled out its agentic experience to support capturing the full complexity of patient visits with Care Signals, which it co-designed and deployed at Kaiser Permanente, Becker's Health IT reported.
Abridge says its technology now supports the entire clinical encounter—helping clinicians prepare before the visit with pre-visit summaries, capturing the patient conversation and generating structured documentation like referral letters while also surfacing evidence-based and cited insights to clinical questions.
"It's becoming a comprehensive intelligence platform. It is becoming the tool that a clinician can leverage as a focal point in their workflow before, during and after all of their visits," Troup said.
The growing use of AI in clinical settings raises questions about how to balance the efficiency of automating workflows with the need to preserve clinicians' independent judgment. It's an issue that's top of mind for most healthcare tech leaders.
"I think, in some ways, AI is rapidly democratizing expertise, but judgment and critical thinking are still in the domain of the clinicians," Poon said, adding, "These are some of the nuanced conversations that needs to happen, particularly for our young and up-and-coming clinicians."
Troup asserted that Abridge has "earned the right" to participate in conversations about the role of the clinician in the age of AI.
"The dialogue we continue to have, internally and externally with our partners, is we can build this infrastructure, we can build this intelligence layer, and we can also preserve the work of a clinician to be the decision-maker in that moment and to be the validation step," he noted.
The rapid adoption of AI scribes has already fundamentally changed clinical work as some physicians have not manually drafted a clinical note in several years, Poon noted.
As healthcare AI companies continue to innovate, Poon asserts that there is an opportunity to "reimagine the future practice of medicine."
"I think the electronic medical record has basically digitized the old paradigm of care, and I think with agentic AI, ambient technology, and maybe computer vision working together, for both the clinician and the patient, I think we have the opportunity to surround each clinician and each patient with technology to helps them answer questions when they think about it at the point that is most relevant to them, and that will introduce all kinds of new opportunities for how we practice medicine," Poon said, adding, "There is still a lot of unmet need. We are still not available 24/7, 365 for questions of all kinds. I do think that technology is potentially going to bridge that gap for us."