Providers are rapidly adopting generative AI-based clinical documentation tools to aid clinicians and make digital paperwork more efficient.
But, for many providers AI medical scribe technology that can support multiple languages is essential to care for a diverse population of patients.
Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA), the only public academic health system in Massachusetts, is deploying Abridge's AI-based medical note-taking tool across its 600 clinicians after a successful pilot.
CHA is an innovative healthcare system and a Harvard Teaching Hospital serving a diverse patient population of about 140,000 people in the city's metro-north region. CHA's services include primary care, behavioral health, emergency care, surgery and specialty care, hospital care, maternity and state-of-the-art testing services.
Abridge’s multilingual capabilities are essential for CHA's patient population, as nearly half (43%) of patients speak a language other than English as a primary language, said Hannah Galvin, M.D., CHA's chief medical information officer. Languages spoken include Portuguese and Spanish, among others.
"We needed a tool that would work just as well with interpreters and have found that Abridge does that; in fact, some of our interpreters have found that Abridge has picked up things that they missed in their translation," Galvin told Fierce Healthcare. "Moreover, many of our staff are certified as bilingual, and we have so far found in our pilot that Abridge does well to understand visits conducted in Spanish, drafting the note in English. We are collecting data on other languages and hope to publish this with Abridge soon."
CHA chose Abridge because of its multilingual capabilities that empower its clinicians—from primary care to pulmonology, orthopedics, pediatrics, and other specialties—to better serve its diverse, often underserved community. Abridge’s speech recognition technology is validated for 28 languages, including the 16 most spoken in the U.S.
"CHA was very impressed with Abridge's demo at HIMSS 2023 and has been continually impressed by Abridge as a vendor partner, including their commitment to equity in supporting patients who speak primary languages other than English, making their ambient technologies affordable to safety net organizations like CHA, and their dedication to customer service, continual improvement, and innovating together," Galvin said.
"The way our technology works is it automatically detects what language you're speaking in so that you don't need to, as a clinician, in advance, go through any menus or select any specific languages, anticipating what you're going to speak in. The technology's job is to recognize those languages, to detect them, recognize the words, and then generate the note afterwards," Shiv Rao, M.D., CEO and founder of Abridge, told Fierce Healthcare.
"We have a rigorous approach to validating our performance on languages before we actually market them. We are currently validated in 28 languages that includes 16 of the most spoken in the U.S. That's a key aspect of our relationship with Cambridge Health Alliance and a requirement in order to be able to scale across their system."
During the pilot phase of using Abridge's technology, CHA saw a 12.6% decrease in pajama time among high utilizers, and a 22.8% decrease in time in notes per day, Galvin said. "But more than the quantitative data, we had a number of providers who have reported that the Abridge ambient technology is 'life-changing'," she said.
Pittsburgh-based Abridge, one of Fierce Healthcare's Fierce 15 of 2024 honorees, launched in 2018 after developing automatic speech recognition and note generation technology. It 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.
As AI becomes ubiquitous in clinical settings, technology companies must ensure that its benefits are spread equitably among clinician and patient populations, Rao noted.
"With new, cutting-edge technology, it tends to first hit the academic medical centers, the very forward-thinking health systems, before it, over time, gets to safety net health systems, or federally qualified health centers," Rao noted. "From a mission perspective, we truly want Abridge to be a part of every medical conversation. We truly believe that we can improve the care delivery experience for the most important people, the patient person foremost, and then it's the clinician."
As AI tech evolves, it becomes incumbent for these technologies to "lean in" and "meet the patient where they are," Rao said. "This technology needs to be able to scale across, not just specialties, not just settings, but also spoken languages in order to, over time, really democratize it across the country."
Galvin said CHA has, so far, mostly focused on using Abridge's technology in the ambulatory setting, but the organization is planning to start a pilot in the emergency department in early 2025.
"We are also looking into opportunities in the inpatient space. We are working with Abridge and OpenNotes on patient-facing versions of notes. Finally, we are very excited to have our nursing leadership working closely with Abridge to advise on the development of ambient functionality for nurses," she said.
Abridge has raised $212.5 million to date, banking a $150 million series C funding round back in February.
The company has inked partnerships with major health systems, being deployed enterprise-wide at Kaiser Permanente, 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.
Abridge has also formed partnerships with Wolters Kluwer, OpenNotes and other healthcare organizations.