Since launching its ambient medical transcription tool eight years ago, Abridge has set its sights on building a full-fledged AI clinical assistant more broadly. The company is steadily developing technology and capabilities to support billing, pre-authorization and clinical decision-making.
Today, the company announced significant platform enhancements 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 Dr. Shiv Rao announced Thursday at an event in New York City that pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Company has made a strategic investment in the company “to support evidence-based treatments and research.” Financial details of the investment were not disclosed.
With the platform expansion, the company will link real-time documentation and real-time claims workflows to help health systems and payers reduce rework, support patients faster, and get as close to real-time adjudication as possible, executives said Thursday. The goal is to support quality programs, value-based care, and coordination of reimbursement and payments, executives said in a press release before an event in Manhattan on Thursday.
AI companies are seizing the opportunity to build “bridges” between healthcare providers and health plans to speed insurance approvals and move downstream billing and claims workflows.
This 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 administrative tasks. A year ago, the company announced what it calls a “contextual inference engine” that generates billable notes that support appropriate billing at the point of care. The company is also working with Highmark Health to co-design an AI-powered pre-authorization solution at the point of care.
At the annual JPMorgan Healthcare Conference in January, Abridge announced a partnership with real-time health information network Availity to launch AI-powered pre-authorization. Abridge and Availity said in January that combining their technologies could significantly reduce pre-authorization from months to minutes.
“We started Abridge to save time, save money, and save lives. This next chapter brings trusted intelligence to the most important moments in healthcare: clinicians caring for patients. Abridge is rooting AI into the clinical conversation so that clinicians can “We help health systems connect patients to evidence and resources that can improve care delivery, align payment with care, and improve outcomes,” said Shiv Rao, M.D., CEO and co-founder of Abridge. In a statement.
Abridge has partnered with AHIMA, the Association of Health Information and Coding Professionals, to support the quality, accuracy, and auditability of Abridge coding output. The partnership will support Abridge’s coding and clinical documentation improvement (CDI) capabilities across fee-for-service and value-based healthcare reimbursement models, executives said.
On the life sciences side, Abridge is moving towards collaborating with organizations to support access to evidence-based care and research. The company sees an opportunity to leverage its AI-powered platform to help health systems identify potential trial candidates and initiate the appropriate screening pathway at the point of care, executives said.
Abridge currently works with 300 health systems, including community health centers, specialty hospitals, and the nation’s largest health care providers, and is growing rapidly with health care providers. Its technology supports more than 100 million conversations annually. Together, these organizations serve more than 250 million patients, Abridge said.
Northwestern Medicine, one of the leading academic medical centers, has deployed Abridge across its entire network of hospitals and medical practices.
Abridge also announced new content collaborations with the American Diabetes Association and the American Academy of Family Physicians to build clinical decision support solutions. The company’s CDS content library is powered by Wolters Kluwer’s UpToDate, The New England Journal of Medicine, and JAMA. Abridge executives say clinicians can connect medical evidence with patient records and clinical conversations to gain contextual insights into specific patient encounters.
The company plans to expand its content library to include “specialty-focused evidence and region-specific clinical protocols,” company executives said. Abridge will also integrate health systems’ own care pathways and quality benchmarks, allowing them to gain contextual insights not only to a clinician’s individual discipline, but also to a specific facility 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 patient outcomes. Our responsibility is to ensure that this science does not remain static and that decisions are made. We see our work with Abbridge as an opportunity to do just that,” Marielle Jessup, MD, chief scientific and medical officer of the American Heart Association, said in a statement.
The company also announced new “smart room” integrations with Artisight and hellocare.ai, combining AI scribe with AI-assisted virtual care and intelligent room technology for inpatient care.
“UCHealth has implemented Hellocare’s AI-enabled smart room technology and Abridge’s ambient note-taking support system-wide, fully integrating with our virtual health center,” said Richard Zane, MD, chief medical and innovation officer at UCHealth. “By automating routine tasks and enabling continuous virtual monitoring, this innovative care model is expected to streamline workflow, reduce cognitive and administrative burden, improve safety and quality, and allow nurses and clinicians more time to focus on direct patient care.”
