Abridge's newly expanded platform moves beyond the company's AI scribing tool to provide enhanced clinician support before, during and after patient visits, the company has announced.
The company has also announced new collaborations and workflows that aim to connect health systems with payers and life sciences organizations.
According to Abridge, the clinician intelligence platform provides an "intelligence layer for the whole care journey."
For instance, the platform can create pre-visit notes to help clinicians prepare for their patient visit or inpatient rounding, gathering information from medical histories, emergency department documentation, nursing assessments, labs, imaging and summaries of prior patient visits.
During the visit, the platform can not only record and transcribe but also suggest discussion topics based on the patient's medical summary and clinical conversations without the clinician having to switch applications. Following the patient visit, the platform can provide clinical documentation, patient summaries and orders for clinicians to review.
At a demo event in New York City on June 11, Shiv Rao, M.D., co-founder and CEO of Abridge, called the new platform a "clinical conversation foundation model." The platform will include voice-based capabilities, enabling clinicians to interact with it by speaking.
Additionally, the Abridge platform includes access to its clinical decision support feature that provides clinicians with medical evidence. The company announced new content collaborations with the American Diabetes Association and American Academy of Family Physicians, adding to prior collaborations with Wolters Kluwer's UpToDate, The New England Journal of Medicine and the JAMA network.
"This next chapter brings trusted intelligence into the most important moment in medicine: a clinician caring for a patient," Rao said in the press release. "By grounding AI in the clinical conversation, Abridge can free clinicians to focus more on the practice of medicine and less on the process, help health systems improve care delivery, align payment with the care actually delivered, and connect patients to evidence and resources that can improve outcomes."
Abridge enters into new collaborations
In addition to the platform expansion, Abridge announced various new collaborations and partnerships.
Most notably, Eli Lilly and Co. has made a strategic investment in the company to support research. The company further noted that its platform can help providers identify potential clinical trial candidates and initiate screening pathways.
Northwestern Medicine announced that it will implement Abridge enterprise-wide. In the press release, Doug King, Northwestern Medicine's CIO, said that the technology will "support continuity across the patient journey, enabling more coordinated care before, during, and after each visit."
Abridge's connections will extend beyond the provider and pharmaceutical space. The company is also partnering with AHIMA, the trade association for health information and medical coding professionals, to support the quality and accuracy of the Abridge platform's coding outputs.
The platform connects documentation and claims workflows, creating a shared foundation for providers and payers to collaborate on approving and adjudicating claims. The collaboration with AHIMA aims to ensure that Abridge's coding and clinical documentation improvement capabilities are evaluated rigorously across fee-for-service and value-based care reimbursement models, according to the press release.
Further, the company is working with smart room developers Artisight and hellocare.ai. Abridge is integrating its platform into the AI-enabled smart room technology suite provided by these companies to support clinical workflows during inpatient stays, the press release noted.
And finally, Abridge and the American Heart Association plan to explore how ambient clinical intelligence can advance cardiovascular research. The collaboration's goal is to glean insights into how cardiovascular care is delivered from clinical conversations captured by the ambient AI technology.
As AI technology evolves, opportunities to automate and connect various clinical and administrative workflows are growing. Abridge joins other AI-driven companies in expanding its platform, including OpenEvidence, which recently added AI coding suggestions as well as prescription and prior authorization capabilities.
Anuja Vaidya has covered the healthcare industry since 2012. She currently covers healthcare IT and innovation, including artificial intelligence, digital healthcare, EHRs and interoperability.
