Clinical AI startup Shorten is one of the best-funded health tech startups in the country, having raised $1.1 billion since its founding in 2018. On Thursday, the startup held an event in New York to demonstrate how it is using those funds, announcing several new partnerships and platform capabilities.
The company’s announcements demonstrate a deliberate move beyond the documentation of AI to the broader infrastructure of how care is delivered and paid for. During his keynote address, CEO Shiv Rao said Abridge’s vision is focused on moving administrative work upstream, as well as using the clinical conversation as a connecting layer between providers, payers and pharmaceutical companies.
“Our opportunity right now is to use AI to really rethink the system, rethink the system. Can we compress workflows? Can we let agents come to lunch and learn about compliant documentation and build on that? Can we let AI figure out how to do all this administrative work, so I can spend more time with my patients?” he asked.
Rao then detailed the new features and initiatives being rolled out to help bring this bold vision to life. Below are the most notable updates he shared during the event.
A redesigned clinical intelligence platform
Abridge has unveiled its new, enhanced clinical intelligence platform, which aims to help clinicians before, during and after each patient visit rather than just inside the exam room.
Before the appointment, the platform prepares clinicians with concise patient summaries extracted from the EHR, and during the encounter, it provides decision support and captures the conversation in more than 28 languages. Then it generates clinical documentation, billing codes, and lab orders that clinicians can review and submit.
Rao said more than 300 health systems will be operational with the new platform in the next 12 months, adding that Northwest Medicine is the latest health system to adopt the platform enterprise-wide.
Teaming up with Nvidia
Today, most clinical AI starts with a general-purpose model that then learns medicine – but Abridge and AI powerhouse Nvidia launched a partnership that takes a different approach. They are working together to build what the companies say is the first core AI model designed specifically for clinical conversations.
The model aims to apply clinical knowledge at every stage of AI training so that it can reason like a clinician rather than imitating one, explained Kimberly Powell, vice president of healthcare at Nvidia. She said generic AI models are not enough for clinical workflows.
“Imagine trying to introduce a generic AI model into healthcare: it doesn’t understand the clinical language, it doesn’t have the clinical reasoning, and it surely doesn’t have the domain expertise of all the long-running tasks and interconnected work that needs to happen for workflows to be completely transformed,” Powell remarked in an on-stage conversation with Rao.
Eli Lilly investment
Abridge announced a strategic investment from the pharmaceutical giant Elie Lillyalthough financial terms were not disclosed.
This investment is focused on a specific use case: leveraging Abridge’s platform to help identify patients who may be eligible for clinical trials right at the point of care. Abridge’s life sciences module can surface trial eligibility based on clinical conversation, and Lilly is betting that could provide the kind of patient-facing pipeline it needs to accelerate recruitment of new treatments.
You seek to be a bridge – you understand? — between payers and providers
Both Etna And Cigna executives sat on stage with health system leaders to discuss the often-confrontational relationships between payers and providers.
Rao said that in the future, he hopes Abridge’s technology can play a mediating role. All three parties agreed: If clinical documentation is based on the actual conversation at the time care is delivered, providers and payers can stop questioning what happened after the fact and start agreeing on it in real time.
It’s an appealing vision, but getting rivals to share data and play nice is, of course, easier said than done.
Photo: Katie Adams, MedCity News
