Since launching eight years ago with an ambient medical transcription tool, Abridge has set is sights more broadly on building out a full-scale AI clinical assistant. The company is steadily developing tech and features to assist with billing, prior authorization and clinical decision making.
Today, the company 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.
Abridge CEO and co-founder Shiv Rao, M.D., announced Thursday at an event in New York City that pharma giant Eli Lilly and Company made a strategic investment in the company to "support evidence-based care and research." The financial details of the investment were not disclosed.
With the platform expansion, the company is aligning real-time documentation with real-time claims workflows, executives said Thursday, to enable health systems and payers to reduce rework, support patients faster and move closer to real-time adjudication where possible. The aim is to support quality programs, value-based care, reimbursement and payment alignment, executives said in a press release issued before an event in Manhattan on Thursday.
The AI company sees opportunities to move downstream to billing and claims workflows, building a "bridge" between providers and health plans to speed up insurance approvals.
It marks the next evolution of Abridge's AI platform, which started with ambient listening and AI-powered clinical notes and has steadily expanded beyond clinical documentation to tackle other admin tasks. A year ago, the company unveiled what it dubbed a "contextual reasoning engine" that produces billable notes that support appropriate claims at the point of care. The company is also working with Highmark Health to co-design an AI-powered prior authorization solution at the point of care.
At the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in January, Abridge announced it was partnering with real-time health information network Availity to fire up AI-powered prior authorization. The integration of the two companies’ technologies could significantly speed up prior auth, from months to minutes, Abridge and Availity said in January.
"We started Abridge to save time, save money, and save lives. This next chapter brings trusted intelligence into the most important moment in medicine: a clinician caring for a patient. By grounding AI in the clinical conversation, Abridge can free clinicians to focus more on the practice of medicine and less on the process, help health systems improve care delivery, align payment with the care actually delivered, and connect patients to evidence and resources that can improve outcomes,” Shiv Rao, M.D., CEO and co-founder of Abridge, said in a statement.
Abridge is partnering with AHIMA, an association for health information and medical coding professionals, to support the quality, accuracy and auditability of Abridge coding outputs. The collaboration will help support Abridge’s coding and clinical documentation improvement (CDI) capabilities across fee-for-service and value-based care reimbursement models, executives said.
On the life sciences side, Abridge is moving to collaborate with organizations to support evidence-based care and research access. The company sees opportunities to use its AI-powered platform to help health systems identify potential trial candidates and initiate appropriate screening pathways at the point of care, executives said.
Abridge is growing rapidly with healthcare providers as it now works with 300 health systems, including community health centers, specialty hospitals and the largest providers in the country. Its technology supports more than 100 million conversations annually. These organizations collectively serve more than 250 million patients, according to Abridge.
Northwestern Medicine, one of the leading academic medical centers, is implementing Abridge enterprise-wide across all its hospitals and network of medical practices.
Abridge also unveiled new content collaborations with the American Diabetes Association and American Academy of Family Physicians as builds out its clinical decision support solution. The company's content library for its CDS is anchored by Wolters Kluwer’s UpToDate, The New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA. By bringing together medical evidence with the patient record and clinical conversations, clinicians have insights contextualized to that specific patient encounter, according to Abridge executives.
The company plans to expand the content library to encompass "specialty-focused evidence and localized clinical protocols," executives said. And, Abridge will be able to integrate health systems' own treatment pathways and quality benchmarks as well for insights contextualized not only to a clinician’s individual field, but also to the specific institutional environment.
Abridge also announced Thursday a partnership with the American Heart Association (AHA) to explore how ambient clinical intelligence can advance cardiovascular research and evidence generation.
"When the latest evidence is available at the point of care, or at the point of need, it can save time, reduce variability, and support better outcomes for patients. Our responsibility is to help ensure that this science does not remain static, but is integrated into the environments where decisions are being made. We see our work with Abridge as an opportunity to do exactly that,” Mariell Jessup, M.D., the American Heart Association's chief science and medical officer, said in a statement.
And the company unveiled new "smart room" integrations with Artisight and hellocare.ai to combine its AI scribe with AI-assisted virtual care and intelligent hospital room technology for inpatient care.
“UCHealth is deploying hellocare’s AI‑enabled smart room technology with Abridge’s ambient note-taking support system-wide, fully integrated with our Virtual Health Center," said Richard Zane, M.D., UCHealth chief medical and innovation officer. "By automating routine tasks and enabling continuous virtual monitoring, we expect this innovative model of care to streamline workflows, reduce cognitive and administrative burden, improve safety and quality, and free nurses and clinicians to focus more of their time on direct patient care."