Abridge entered the healthcare market eight years ago as an artificial intelligence scribe, but the company has steadily built technology that acts like an AI assistant throughout clinical workflows.
The company is expanding its clinical decision support solutions through a partnership with Wolters Kluwer’s UpToDate, a clinical evidence solution that has been on the market for 30 years. Abridge is working with Wolters Kluwer to integrate contextual clinical decision support within ambient documentation workflows, giving clinicians easy access to evidence-based answers at the point of conversation. This feature allows clinicians to instantly gain relevant clinical and treatment insights without another search or extra clicks, executives said.
Abridge made the feature generally available to all customers at the end of March, Matt Tropp, Physician Assistant Certification (PA-C), Abridge’s director of clinical strategy, told Fierce Healthcare in an interview earlier this month.
The partnership combines real-time clinical evidence and guidance from UpToDate with patient context from AI-powered clinical notes within Abridge, Troup said.
“In the same workflow where the notes are generated, we have this Abridge AI interface that allows the clinician to ask questions directly about the patient, such as, ‘Do I need to titrate this medication? What other treatment options do I have? Given the conversation I just had, what is the appropriate antibiotic?'” UpToDate’s content is then leveraged with the model to provide responses to the clinician within the workflow. We also have access to the transcripts and notes that we just created, so we actually use that as context, so we get context-aware education shaped by the patient right in front of the clinician in the workflow,” Troup said.
On Wednesday, Abridge announced a new partnership with NEJM Group and the American Medical Association to expand content integration within its clinical decision support solution called Abridge AI. These integrations will be generally available in the coming months, the company said.
Under agreements with NEJM Group, publisher of the New England Journal of Medicine, and the AMA, publisher of the JAMA and JAMA Network families of publications, the content of these publications will inform Abridge’s clinical decision support system. The JAMA Network includes 11 journals and JAMA Network Open.
The multi-year content partnership agreement will enable clinicians using Abridge to leverage peer-reviewed research before and after patient conversations within their existing workflows and as part of their growing decision support capabilities, Abridge executives said.
“Clinicians are managing complexity more than ever before, and these content partnerships will make trusted clinical evidence available without compromising our focus on the patient,” Shiv Rao, MD, CEO and co-founder of Abridge and a practicing cardiologist, said in a statement. “There is no higher scientific standard in medicine than the research published in the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA. We strive to translate that standard into clinical practice as contextual insights based on conversations with patients.”
Abridge says its technology now supports the entire clinical setting, helping clinicians prepare before an appointment, capturing patient conversations, generating structured documents, and uncovering evidence-based, cited insights to clinical questions, all within a single workflow.
Abridge currently works with 250 health systems. The company said it is on track to support 100 million patient-doctor conversations by 2026.
NEJM Group and JAMA Network have signed a multi-year content agreement with OpenEvidence, an AI-powered medical search engine. OpenEvidence and Abridge are both experiencing rapid growth in their respective markets and are making contrasting moves to become AI co-pilots for clinicians.
Abridge aims to extend its AI capabilities beyond clinical documentation to tackle other administrative tasks such as pre-authorization. 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-UpToDate integration details
Both Wolters Kluwer and Abridge have expanded their businesses by working with large health systems, hospitals, and academic institutions by incorporating enterprise-grade features into provider workflows.
UpToDate is a widely used clinical decision support resource, providing access to over 13,000 clinical topics across 25 specialties. UpToDate has over 3 million clinician users working in thousands of hospitals.
Julie Frey, vice president of clinical decision support at Wolters Kluwer Health, told Fierce Healthcare in a joint interview with Abridge’s Troup that the two companies’ customers overlap considerably.
“This capability came very loudly from our joint customers’ requests, and I think we’re both very enterprise-level focused in how we think about governance, how we think about the health system as an organization, and how we enable all use cases across the organization, so there’s a natural synergy,” Frey said.
At the HIMSS 2026 conference in March, Greg Samios, CEO of Wolters Kluwer Health, said the Abridge and UpToDate partnership represents the “holy grail” healthcare organizations have been pursuing for years. “It’s about matching the best evidence to the patient’s unique circumstances in the clinician’s workflow,” he told Fierce Healthcare.
Abridge’s built-in clinical decision support capabilities help reduce cognitive load on clinicians and improve decision-making effectiveness, Frey said. But the benefits go beyond efficiency and productivity, she added.
“We’re starting to hear that it’s giving clinicians more confidence,” she says.
Abridge says it is rigorously evaluating AI-powered CDS capabilities for enterprises. The company’s scientific team is conducting a comprehensive offline evaluation of CDS support to assess accuracy and safety, executives said. Throughout the pre-release process for Abridge’s CDS capabilities, the company’s clinical teams conducted hundreds of queries across a wide range of medical specialties designed to test the system and identify failure modes that only surface real-world complexities.
Having reliable clinical evidence at the point of treatment is important, Troup noted. A widely cited statistic is that medical knowledge doubles every 73 days. “It’s important to partner with organizations like UpToDate that can leverage the latest and best evidence-based guidelines,” Troup said.
“I’ve been a clinician for about 17 years, and I feel like I grew up with UpToDate. There was no question that if we were going to build this tool to be as impactful as possible, it made perfect sense to use UpToDate’s content as a database,” he said. “It’s important what kind of partners we have in this space, because for this to be a trusted part of the workflow, and because we know the pace of innovation in governance boards and health systems is so fast right now, what we really need to do is rely on trusted partners to make sure they do their best job and really support clinical safety.”
During beta testing with early adopter health systems, Abridge heard feedback from clinicians that context-aware clinical decision support was a “game changer,” Tropp said.
“Clinicians have told me that the experience of incorporating this patient conversation and the information shaped by this clinical scenario directly into their workflow has changed the way they practice their practice.”One clinician said, “It really created a great workflow that supported me in providing the care I needed.” That’s the important part of this issue. When information is needed and time is of the essence, we want to create workflows with as little friction as possible. ” he said.
As Abridge builds decision support solutions, there is an opportunity to evaluate how access to clinical evidence can drive better outcomes and overall quality of care, Troup said.
“We are currently tracking usage, certainly the number of queries, but generally just to better understand what kinds of questions clinicians are asking. “I think that’s part of the roadmap for data collection with oDate. What does it mean to have access to evidence-based guidance shaped by the patient sitting in front of you to help you make the best decisions possible?”
“Over time, there may be real opportunities to realize the more difficult ROI of what metrics health systems value and can directly tie to this integration,” Frey added.
Wolters Kluwer is investing heavily in AI to enhance its clinical decision support tools. In October, we launched UpToDate Expert AI, a generative AI-powered version of our widely used CDS solution. The company describes it as the next evolution of UpToDate, addressing clinicians’ needs for the speed and power of generative AI with trusted medical knowledge.
As healthcare AI evolves, startups and companies that initially focused on different use cases are blurring the lines and moving toward comprehensive AI co-pilot. Partnerships between various health tech companies are also advancing AI capabilities across clinical workflows.
“What we ultimately want is to empower clinicians to make decisions and take action. What we’re seeing is a kind of evolution of product categories, where we thought we were kind of siloing things. And I think part of that is just the maturation of different technologies and budgets. We’re getting back to the mission and what our organization is trying to do. “If we go back to the basics, we’re trying to help drive clinicians’ decisions and actions. The more we can do that, the more we can reduce siled product categories and enable that, the more we can benefit from it and I think that’s really aligned with the ultimate mission of these businesses,” Frey said.
Abridge’s team is also thinking about how clinical evidence synthesis can evolve to encourage lively discussions with clinicians, rather than just answering questions.
“Maybe there are evidence-based pathways that haven’t been explored yet. Maybe there are quality gaps that they can fill based on what we know about conversations and what we’re getting out of UpToDate. We start to equip physicians to empower them, give them superpowers, make them the heroes of their own stories,” Troup said, noting that decision support tools could move from being in the background to being co-pilots controlled by clinicians.
