How Shiv Rao’s Abridge Is Freeing Clinicians from Administrative Burdens
When Shiv Rao, MD, was named late last year to Time’s list of the 100 Most Influential People in artificial intelligence, it came as no surprise to clinicians at Mass General Brigham. As the CEO and Founder of Abridge, Rao has built the AI-powered medical scribe startup that documents patient-clinician conversations into structured clinical notes in real time. The platform, integrated into Epic and piloted with hundreds of physicians at the health system, is now moving toward implementation.
Abridge is a game changer for clinicians and patients. At Mass General Brigham and elsewhere the startup has been receiving rave reviews from physicians for liberating them from “pajama time,” the hours of paperwork that follow them home, disrupting work-life balance and contributing to clinician burnout. As a practicing cardiologist at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Rao’s familiarity with the dreaded slog at day’s end haunted him and loomed large.
Enter Abridge.
The medically tailored speech recognition system with note generation transforms raw transcripts into drafts of clinical notes that physicians can then spot check for accuracy. Accuracy rates run in the 90th percentile. Abridge lets clinicians concentrate on what’s important-- interacting wholly with patients--not sharing appointment time perched over keyboards. With clinician burnout at an all-time high, the platform is making for happier clinicians, delivering better clarity for patients, and providing more efficiencies to healthcare systems that are combatting clinician shortages and exoduses.
Rao, one of a small handful of honorees in the Time innovator category, says that the notoriety from the distinction has broadened the reach of the innovation tech to those who did not know it existed and the ways it improves care delivery.
Some history
Abridge’s success benefited from a team effort at Mass General Brigham where different stakeholders met with the company as its technology evolved, including Mass General Brigham’s Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation Fund (AIDIF), led by Gaye Bok, MBA, who serves as Partner, which first met with the company in 2020. Adam Landman, MD, Chief Information Officer and Senior Vice President, Digital, and Mass General Brigham’s Emerging Technology Solutions assessed Abridge’s capabilities. “Starting in 2023, we rigorously evaluated the quality, safety, and accuracy of Abridge’s capabilities in a phased manner, and are now scaling the solution more broadly," says Landman.
In February 2023, AIDIF participated in Abridge’s Series C funding of $150 million, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Redpoint Ventures. This funding round came together just months after Abridge had secured its $30 million Series B funding. The company has continued to grow rapidly and closed an additional $250 million Series D funding round in late 2024.
The usage
Abridge regularly receives feedback from clinicians who are using it, and like any responsible enterprise, constantly seeks to perfect or enhance its wares.
“We’ve had the privilege to deploy this platform for physicians across MGB last year,” says Rao. “Their feedback is like oxygen to us, and it helps us gain more conviction. It’s also a more profound way to demonstrate that our partnership is impactful,” he adds. “It’s a fruitful collaboration and partnership.”
Once feedback is received at the company, “teams pounce on it, and address it,” Rao offers. Rebecca Mishuris, MD, Chief Medical Information Officer and Vice President at Mass General Brigham, agrees. When clinicians noticed that Abridge was misidentifying pronouns, for example, the company immediately went to work to find a solution. It did.
Most recently, Johns Hopkins Medicine signed on to Abridge, as well as UChicago Medicine, and locally, Cambridge Health Alliance. Rao would not divulge the number of systems or hospitals that are using Abridge, only that most are not presently in the piloting stage. They’ve adopted the technology.
Abridge is performing in 28 languages to date, including Haitian Creole (considered one of the top five languages spoken by patients at Mass General Brigham) and Catalan. At Mass General Brigham, languages that clinicians have tapped into so far for ambient documentation are Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Portuguese, Tagalog, Arabic, Vietnamese and Japanese. More than 50 hospital specialties use Abridge for their notes.
Mishuris, a primary care physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, has used ambient documentation and is pleased with it. Today, she does not split her evenings with EHR “pajama time.” One of the benefits of leaving note taking behind, she says, is relieving clinicians of the “cognitive burden,” they carry when they chart after clinic hours. Recalling every relevant part of a patient visit that occurred hours earlier becomes more difficult.
Mass General Brigham has conducted an analysis on ambient documentation being used at the health system.
Findings from the Mass General Brigham clinician study include:
- A reported reduction of time spent on clinical notes, from 90 minutes to under 30 minutes
- 60 percent indicated that they were more likely to extend their clinical careers now
- 79 percent said they are focusing more on their patients
- 39 percent reduction in providers reporting burnout
Says Mishuris, the reduction in burnout is “huge, because clinician burnout is at a critical point nationally, and ambient documentation appears to have real impact for these providers’ sense of wellbeing.”
At appointments, patients are made aware of the ambient documentation and they, too, appreciate the new order allowing their physician to better interact and engage with them. Clinicians have time to go into more depth about medical issues, something that time constraints made difficult before.
What’s to come?
Future studies hope to uncover if this new documentation will streamline capacity issues that most hospital systems are experiencing. Prior studies with human scribes have found that some physicians may be able to perhaps see an additional patient in a clinic day because of the tech.
There may also be a role for billing with ambient documentation, seeing fuller conversations with patients record not only chief complaints the patient has, but also secondary ones that are usually left out of documentation with traditional notetaking. As an example, Mishuris cites another provider who was using ambient documentation: The patient’s visit was for one condition, but another condition was revealed during the visit. The secondary concern, she said, would not necessarily have made its way into the patient chart had the provider been taking the notes manually. However, ambient documentation had captured it for its produced draft note.
“This documentation is a technology that is putting us (physicians) back in the room with our patients,” she says. “We’re getting typing out of the way, building the patient experience, inspiring great rapport in addition to improving clinician well-being.”
“We know that physicians using the platform have told us that they were once preparing to retire from practicing of medicine because of the all the administrative tasks that take away from patients, and now they are not going to,” says Rao.
In fact, on the Abridge web site, a section is full of clinician testimonials singing the praises of the platform.
What’s next for Abridge? To improve the product and extend into other clerical work, health equity and literacy. “We plan on democratizing Abridge by implementing it in health centers and other communities,” says Rao.
“It’s been a privilege to partner with Mass General Brigham and we look forward to continuing our partnership,” he says. “The sky is the limit for what’s possible with this exciting tech.”
(Shiv Rao, MD, was a panelist at the World Medical Innovation Forum 2024. Watch the session he participated in: Generative AI Enabled Care Paths.)