Abridge, Wolters Kluwer Health ink partnership to integrate UpToDate with AI medical scribe

Wolters Kluwer Health, a big player in clinical decision support solutions, is teaming up with Abridge to integrate UpToDate into the startup's AI-based medical note-taking tool.

It marks a unique partnership between a legacy player—UpToDate has been in the market for 30 years—and a genAI startup as artificial intelligence advances rapidly in healthcare.

With the integration, Abridge’s draft clinical notes will include links to the latest, evidence-based recommendations from UpToDate, an evidence-based clinical decision support resource that clinicians use at the point of care, company executives told Fierce Healthcare in an exclusive interview.

Access to the most current evidence at the point of care can help inform clinical decisions, according to the companies. Through this partnership, clinicians with UpToDate will have integrated access to relevant clinical information included in their Abridge generated notes. This will help augment care decisions with more informed documentation and recommendations via automatic prompting during the appointment and into the clinical note.

With more efficient note-taking and decision support at their fingertips, physicians can focus more on patients during their clinical visits.

Shiv Rao, M.D., a cardiologist who launched Abridge in 2018, sees the value of bringing trusted, evidence-based insights to the clinician at the time and place where they can be most effective for making care decisions—into the clinical note.

"Every time I've seen patients since, starting in medical school and then residency, and then even after becoming an attending, UpToDate is my source for trusted medical information. What's incredibly exciting in this new world where generative AI is able to create so much value and unburden clinicians from a lot of the clerical work that they have to do, being able to connect the dots between what generative AI can do and these trusted sources of information, like UpToDate, is where we perceive a lot of magic to be. I'm excited about going after that opportunity now, together with them," Rao said in an interview.

Pittsburgh-based Abridge, one of Fierce Healthcare's Fierce 15 of 2024 honorees, uses AI to increase the speed and accuracy of medical note-taking, leveraging a proprietary data set derived from more than 1.5 million medical encounters. The company's AI converts a patient-clinician conversation into a structured clinical note draft in real time and integrates it seamlessly into the electronic health record system.

Wolters Kluwer's UpToDate platform is used on smartphones, browsers and within electronic health record systems by over 2 million clinicians and 44,000 institutions across more than 190 countries. It is updated continuously and used heavily with users accessing over 54 million topics per month across 25 specialties.

Wolters Kluwer Health saw an opportunity to work with "one of the leading players in the market" to address the ongoing challenge of clinician burden with tedious, time-consuming administrative tasks.

"Abridge has a nice solution through their ambient platform to reduce that clinician burden through automation. And, this is core to our strategy. We're the leader in clinical decision support as a trusted resource, and the more we can integrate and reduce friction, the better," said Greg Samios, president and CEO of Clinical Effectiveness at Wolters Kluwer Health.

Abridge’s efficient, AI-generated note drafts will now be bolstered by UpToDate’s evidence-based resources, relied upon by millions of clinicians,” Samios noted.

"The integration will further transform the clinical workflow in an intuitive, contextual, and responsible manner to help reduce administrative burden while improving patient experiences," he said in a statement.

As physicians are eager to use generative AI-based tools to help with notetaking and research, there has been significant uptake in the use of publicly available tools like ChatGPT, which is not trained on medical data.

Fierce Healthcare collaborated with physician social network Sermo to conduct a survey of physicians. It found that 76% of respondents reported using general-purpose LLMs in clinical decision-making, as Senior Writer Anastassia Gliadkovskaya reports. More than 60% of physicians reported using LLMs like ChatGPT to check drug interactions, while more than half use them for diagnosis support. Nearly half use them to generate clinical documentation, and more than 40% use them for treatment planning. Seventy percent use them for patient education and literature search. 

"Many of us clinicians recognize the magic inherent in products like ChatGPT, and we also recognize the limitations of products like ChatGPT, especially in relation to high-stakes care delivery and clinical decision-making," Rao said. "You might use a ChatGPT, but you should always trust and verify, and if you're going to trust and verify, you're going to do that with Wolters Kluwer, you're going to do that with UpToDate. Part of what we've been trying to figure out together with UpToDate is how do we marry the best of this magic of generative AI with the best of their very trusted content to create a workflow that allows clinicians to benefit from all the upside."

He added, "Being able to inform our models, for example, and help clinicians create better content, more trustworthy notes and notes that are informed by validated medical information is a huge boon and an opportunity for us, and that's the work that we're focused on right now."

A Wolters Kluwer survey earlier this year found that physicians are optimistic about using generative AI in healthcare clinical decision-making and patient care but having a trusted content source is key to adoption. The vast majority of docs (91%) said they need to know that the data used to train the tools were created by doctors and medical experts before using them in clinical decisions. 

The integration unveiled Friday is part of a larger discussion with Wolters Kluwer to explore ways to inform Abridge’s generative AI models with the company's clinical content, Rao noted.

There are opportunities to improve other healthcare processes downstream such as medical coding and revenue cycle, he said.

"This is, right now, the front end of capturing clinician data, diagnosis and treatment information. There's a whole lot of downstream applications you can see this moving to in terms of a platform," Samios said. "We're very excited to take that journey with Abridge as they find new ways to use an ambient platform to drive health outcomes."

He added, "It goes back to our strategy of making sure we're in those right channels as part of clinical decision support and integrated closer with the workflow. This is one of the key areas we see emerging right now."

Abridge has raised $212.5 million to date, banking a $150 million series C funding round back in February. The startup is backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Redpoint Ventures along with the venture capital arms of Mass General Brigham, Kaiser Permanente and CVS Health.

In August, Abridge inked its largest partnership to date with Kaiser Permanente, making the company's AI-powered medical note-taking app available to more than 24,000 doctors across its system. 

Its generative-AI-powered platform has been deployed at the University of Vermont Health System, Christus Health, UChicago Medicine, Sutter Health, Yale New Haven Health System, UCI Health, Emory Healthcare, The University of Kansas Health System, UPMC and dozens of other health systems.

The company is also collaborating with Mayo Clinic and health IT giant Epic to develop a generative AI ambient documentation workflow for nurses.