PITTSBURGH–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Abridge, the leader in medical conversation AI, today announced an oversubscribed $12.5M Series A-1. Led by Wittington Ventures, the round also had participation from all existing investors including Union Square Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Pillar Venture Capital, and UPMC Enterprises, and new investors including Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio, and Whistler Capital. Abridge’s enterprise-focused documentation solutions seamlessly structure and summarize information from any medical conversation, making it easier for systems to reduce provider burnout while also increasing patient satisfaction. Armed with a proprietary dataset derived from more than 1.5 million medical encounters and more peer-reviewed papers about medical conversation AI than any other entity, Abridge has already helped more than 2,000 clinicians practice at the top of their license and 200,000 patients stay on top of their health.
“I became a cardiologist to help my patients improve their health, but the reality was that I was spending more time on my notes than with my patients,” said Dr. Shivdev Rao, CEO and co-founder of Abridge. “Abridge is the solution I always wanted myself, as a physician and as a patient — an AI-based service that leverages conversations I had with my patients to not only draft my documentation but also with the capability to send detailed care plans to them and improve the quality of their care.”
Provider burnout continues to be a serious issue for healthcare systems, especially in the aftermath of the pandemic. National studies suggest that more than 50 percent of providers experience burnout-related symptoms, and systems are anticipating healthcare staffing shortages that will cost $4.6 billion annually. Abridge aims to change that through its innovative tech-first service that automatically generates structured notes from any type of conversation — from in-person visits to telehealth and chat conversations.
“We had strict requirements in looking for new ways to improve healthcare outcomes — we wanted an ambient documentation solution that could ease documentation pressure for our clinicians, while also improving the quality of patient care,” said Dr. Robert Bart, Chief Medical Information Officer at UPMC. “Abridge is the only omnichannel service that scales to all specialties and modalities of care. It’s also the only solution that provides real-time structured data and patient care plans integrated into the electronic health record.”
“While current solutions on the market are anchored on wakewords that force providers to speak unnaturally or services that are difficult to scale, Abridge works with natural conversations and existing health technology infrastructure,” said Megh Gupta, Partner at Wittington Ventures. “This allows Abridge to offer a highly accurate, seamless and cost-effective scribing solution to the masses, setting it apart from the competition and allowing the enterprise to get more value from the millions of healthcare conversations that are happening every day.”
For healthcare enterprises looking to reduce burnout, improve efficiencies, and enhance care delivery, Abridge offers:
- Automated, real-time documentation: Abridge algorithms generate the clinical documentation from the conversation, accurately and within a minute of the conversation.
- Structured insights: Algorithms extract medical information and map back to ontologies and codes, making it easy to get immediate, actionable insights at the encounter and population level.
- Evidence-based notes: All insights are automatically mapped back to the parts of the conversation where they happened, improving coding compliance for billing as well as value based initiatives.
“Abridge has developed technology that can unburden both medical professionals and patients from the difficult task of remembering, documenting, and following through on their clinical encounters,” said Yoshua Bengio, the founder of the Québec AI Institute Mila. “I am excited to support a team that is taking a rigorous approach to AI research, and also applying their novel AI techniques to a real world problem in a way that can scale to improve the healthcare experience for everyone.”
Abridge has current and upcoming partnerships and pilots in place with other prominent health systems, including each of a top three hospital, payer, and pharmacy as well as a Fortune 5 healthcare company. In addition, Abridge is now making its core machine learning technology available via API, helping care delivery entities seamlessly integrate with their existing telemedicine and call center platforms. To that end, Abridge also has technology partnerships in place with Twilio, Genesys, Vonage and more to support easy integrations and implementations. The new funds bring Abridge’s total to $27 million, and will contribute to growing its team and expanding its research and development to further improve and automate documentation workflows. To learn more, visit http://www.abridge.com.
ABOUT ABRIDGE:
Abridge structures and summarizes information from the most important signals in healthcare — spoken conversations. Abridge’s technology is powered by industry-leading R&D, as evidenced by their depth of peer-reviewed publications in medical conversation AI and user experience design. The company’s audio and ambient AI-centered solutions help clinicians practice at the top of their license and patients stay on top of their health. Whether an appointment takes place in-person or via telemedicine, Abridge captures and documents the conversation to meet the needs of providers, patients, and enterprises. Visit http://www.abridge.com and @AbridgeHQ to get the latest information.
ABOUT WITTINGTON VENTURES:
Wittington Ventures is a Toronto-based venture capital firm that backs bold entrepreneurs across North America who are using technology to redefine the future of commerce, healthcare and food. We invest in companies at all stages of the start-up lifecycle and are uniquely positioned to help entrepreneurs through strong affiliations with iconic Canadian brands such as Loblaw, Shoppers Drug Mart, Choice Properties, PC Financial, Holt Renfrew, and Joe Fresh.
