Shiv Rao MD - CEO and Co-founder, Abridge

On Episode 9 , I spoke with Shiv Rao. Dr. Rao is the founder and CEO of Abridge, which uses ambient AI to summarize conversations into clinical documentation. He is also a practicing cardiologist, and previously led the provider-facing investment portfolio for UPMC.

“What did the doctor say?" is inevitably the first question we ask a loved one who has just been to see a clinician. But how often do we get a clear answer ? How many of our loved ones are actually knowledgeable enough to grasp the details of their condition/diagnosis/care plan? Research out of Dartmouth suggests that people forget up to 80% of what they’ve heard from their healthcare professional.

That's what makes Abridge so important, and is likely the reason that over 300,000 people are using the free version of the Abridge app (which you can download here on the app store) to help make sense of medical conversations and share information from clinical consultations with loved ones.

As Dr. Rao pointed out in our conversation, there is a public health emergency occurring in the United States - we do not have the supply of clinicians necessary to meet the demands for care delivery. Compounding a lack of clinicians is an uptick in burnout. The AMA currently estimates that physician burnout is at 63%, and an article in the Journal of Internal Medicine that said clinicians would need 27 hours per day to do all the work that’s required of them. Shiv started Abridge to reduce the documentation burden on physicians, and to provide patients with a digestible, “translated” version of their clinical encounter that they can share with family members.  

The benefits are also significant for clinicians. Over 80% of the clerical work that used to be involved in documenting is now getting automated by Abridge - this solution is currently saving clinicians on the platform an average of 2 hours a day! 

Ultimately, as we discussed, a clinical note has three stakeholders:

1. Other clinicians on the care team - they need to understand Dr. Rao’s medical differential, and how he was thinking about the diagnosis/care plan.
2. Health plans - Dr. Rao needs to build his note in such a way that the diagnosis and follow-up recommendations can be properly coded and billed.
3. Patients and their family members, who may need to take action based on Dr. Rao’s findings, which they thus need to understand.

A single note cannot be all of those things at once. Abridge solves this problem by summarizing and structuring the information to create different artifacts for all three sets of customers.

Abridge has raised $27 million to date from investors like Union Square Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Wittington Ventures. For more information,  you can check out their website: https://www.abridge.com

Please make sure to check out the Society for HealthCare Innovation's (SHCI) website for more content.