Founders: Shiv Rao (CEO), Zack Lipton
Launched: 2018
Headquarters: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Funding: $462.5 million
Valuation: $2.7 billion
Key Technologies: Artificial intelligence, generative AI
Industry:Â Health care
Previous appearances on Disruptor 50 list: 0
Skyrocketing rates of burnout among doctors during the pandemic highlighted a huge problem and patient risk.
Abridge offers a generative AI platform that is designed to reduce physician burnout levels, a note-taking tool that doctors can rely on during conversations with patients, saving them valuable time that too often has been sucked up by documentation. Â
"After I see a patient, I have to write notes, I have to place orders, I have to think about the patient summary," Abridge founder Dr. Shiv Rao told CNBC at a 2024 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society conference. The Abridge technology, Rao said, "allows me to focus on the person in front of me — the most important person, the patient — because when I hit start, have a conversation, then hit stop, I can swivel my chair and within seconds, the note's there."
Abridge's platform is able to structure these notes into draft medical records in outpatient, inpatient and emergency medicine settings. Doctors can then double check these generated visit summaries and medical orders before signing off on them. But Abridge is more than just a transcription tool. The platform is also able to match medical issues with insurance billing codes, along with drafting medical orders. With a feature called Linked Evidence, the information sources used to generate Abridge's medical summaries can be found and verified by physicians.
In 2024, Abridge announced a new health system enterprise customer nearly every week, according to a report by Contrary Research. Some of Abridge's most recent customers include Mayo Clinic, Duke Health, UNC Health and Johns Hopkins Medicine. The company has partnered with Nvidia to further develop Abridge's ability to understand multilingual conversations between doctors and patients. The software is now able to recognize almost 100 languages.
Abridge says that physicians who use its platform at Riverside Health have seen as much as a 55% decrease in burnout.
Burnout levels have come back down to pre-Covid levels, according to American Medical Association data, but it remains a huge issue in healthcare. In 2024, approximately 43% of physicians reported burnout, which was down from over 48% in 2022. Physicians are also at a higher risk for burnout compared to other U.S. workers, according to a study published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
Abridge is just one of the many companies trying to make a name for itself in the booming market for AI medical scribing tools. Competition for Abridge ranges from other startups like Freed and Suki, to tech giants like Microsoft's Nuance Communications, which recently launched an interface update available in the U.S. and Canada. Fellow Disruptor Rad AI also offers written summaries as part of its AI tools for radiologists.
"It'll be incumbent upon us to make sure that we're able to demonstrate differentiation," Rao told CNBC. "So far, we've had good luck these last few years doing that."
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