Dive Brief:
- Abridge rolled out several partnerships Thursday — including with major drugmaker Eli Lilly and technology giant Nvidia — as the artificial intelligence documentation firm expands its platform to better connect with payers and life science companies.
- The AI company is working with Nvidia to create a foundation model, or a base model built on large amounts of data that can be used for a number of general tasks, to be geared toward clinical conversations.
- Additionally, Lilly is making a strategic investment in Abridge “to support evidence-based care and research access at all the moments of care,” CEO Shiv Rao said during a keynote presentation. The size of the investment was not disclosed.
Dive Insight:
Founded in 2018, Abridge develops an AI scribe for providers. The company raised two nine-digit funding rounds last year, and now works with more than 300 health systems across the country, including Kaiser Permanente, Johns Hopkins Medicine and Yale New Haven Health. Chicago-based Northwestern Medicine also plans to roll out Abridge’s tools across the health system, the company said Thursday.
Documentation assistance has become a major use case for AI in the healthcare sector, given providers’ long-term concerns that recording care and other administrative paperwork distracts from patients and drags into after-work hours.
The AI scribe market is highly competitive. A number of companies offer documentation tools, and electronic health record vendors — like Epic and Oracle Health — have entered the space too. That could pose a challenge to pure-play AI documentation firms, as EHRs are already deeply embedded in clinicians’ workflows, experts say.
Now, Abridge is looking to expand its platform to include AI assistance in a broader range of healthcare work, and integrate more closely with payers and life science companies. That should enable quicker claims resolution and improve access to clinical trials for new therapies, the company said during a sweeping keynote Thursday that included a demonstation of its platform.
Abridge’s platform includes a notetaking assistance for providers, as well as capabilities that allow clinicians to receive patient summaries before visits and query the AI on clinical questions. The AI documentation firm has now partnered with the American Diabetes Association, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the journal Neurology and the Journal of Clinical Oncology to add more content to its clinical decision support, Abridge announced Thursday.
Additionally, the AI can also use information from the medical record to help identify potential candidates for clinical trials and start screening them for participation.
In a bid to move toward real-time claims adjudication, Abridge is also collaborating with the American Health Information Management Association to ensure the company’s coding capabilities meet standards for fee-for-service and value-based care reimbursement.
The move to better connect with insurers comes as health plans worry that providers’ use of AI documentation and billing tools could increase healthcare costs. Payers’ own adoption of claims review products could mean providers’ and insurers’ AI tools end up duking it out against each other to hash out reimbursement for care.
