February 18, 2025: Shiv Rao, CEO and co-founder of Abridge, delves into their revolutionary ambient listening technology. Through the lens of 100+ enterprise deployments, Rao explores the delicate balance between technological advancement and clinical practicality. As the discussion unfolds, we discover how contextual reasoning is reshaping documentation and bringing joy back to clinicians.
Key Points:
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[:to have this time with you, too.
Thank you for making it.
Well, I'm looking forward to the conversation. I'm looking down here at your press release. There's a lot of really good stuff in here. I mean, a hundred plus enterprise deployments. And, you know, just, that's significant. I mean, that's AI adoption across healthcare. People are asking me all the time, you know, where is it being adopted?
And it's being adopted here. I'm wondering, you know, what are the key factors that's enabling this? Because it's not just the large health systems. You're doing it. rural specialty. I mean, you're doing it across the board. What's what's making that possible?
Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's all thanks to the team.
h amazing pressure on us and [:It looks like being able to integrate very deeply. It looks like partner success and customer success, but it also looks like the core product. And in terms of our core product, I think one of the key epiphanies for us these last couple of years or a few years, I should say, is that we have to be not only useful for the end user, for the clinician, but we have to be useful for all the different clinicians across all the different specialties and all the different settings in all the different spoken languages.
And that's what it means to be enterprise grade. So the CMIO needs to see in us a platform, the CIO needs to see in us a technology that's going to be around for the decades to come and that can integrate with their stack. And the CFO needs to understand that there's going to be a real financial bottom line ROI associated with this technology.
They just start banging away [:Yeah. Um, well, feedback is oxygen. Um, we, that's a refrain inside the company. Every time we get a piece of feedback, it's not lost. It's, it's, it's, it's hitting, uh, probably like a dedicated team who's now gonna call an escalation that day to figure out, like, how can we actually solve this, this end user's need?
So we take incredible feedback, like incredible pride in being able to iterate and improve all the time. One of the greatest bits of feedback that we got from the health system was the CMIO of the University of Kansas Health System a few years saying that a bridge on Monday was great, and it was even better on Tuesday, and better on Wednesday, and better on Thursday, and better on Friday, and I think feedback is what powers that.
And it can look like qualitative feedback, and sometimes it's quantitative too, but we're always iterating.
d I think anybody with a, in [:You guys are taking it to the next level, which I love. You're integrating it into the complete workflow, into the complete, um, not only the, the position workflow all the way through. And the reason I'm looking down my notes, it's contextual reasoning engine. So, you know, healthcare systems, they, they struggle with documentation.
Change documentation two months after after the visit to get it right. Talk to me about the contextual reasoning engine and how that changes, changes the game.
Yeah, I think that the folks who might be underestimating the opportunity here are the folks who might not understand that in this country, we're not compensated for the care that we deliver.
nd user, um, in terms of how [:But they need to be structured in a way, and it needs to include or sort of incorporate content that comes not only from retrospective clinical data, but oftentimes from the revenue cycle teams, like sort of experts. So as an example, I'm a cardiologist, I saw a patient recently, and they had a pacemaker for a condition called sick sinus syndrome.
Now I just assumed that in, in the, that sick sinus syndrome, given that it's been treated with a pacemaker, that's no longer an active problem, because in the oncology space, if you've had chemo and you've gone into remission, that cancer is no longer an active problem from a coding and billing and revenue cycle perspective.
huge difference in relation [:But selfishly speaking, as an end user, as a doctor, I don't have now, like three, three weeks or four weeks later, I don't have an Epic inbox message or an EMR inbox message asking me to sort of addend that document or telling me that I need to do a better job in the future. So no doctor wants to memorize these tens of thousands of rules, if you will, across all the different payers and all the different geos for fee for service and value based care.
It's almost
impossible. It's impossible, but our technology can do it. It's really interesting. I, you know, I hesitate to take you down this path, but for a CIO, former CIO, the thing I like about this is I can build out the ROI model. I understand the value to the clinician and there's so much, there's a significant importance to doing that.
ase and go, look, this isn't [:But the, but to be able to build out that financial model is helpful to me as somebody who's trying to bring the technology in.
No doubt, no doubt. There's a, I was on the airplane coming in here and I was reading, um, a Charlie Munger book of quotes. And, and he's, he's a great one that just has been like echoing in my head that take an idea and then take it very, very seriously.
And I think that you could take this idea of clinical documentation and not take it seriously and sort of stay superficial. But then, you know, from that CIO's perspective or the CFO's perspective, you could be losing money because you're using a solution that didn't go very, very deep to incorporate all of that contextual information from the payer, from the provider, from the compliance standpoint to create the more billable document.
And so we think it's, it's, it's actually, it should be table stakes, at least in the enterprise healthcare end of the market.
to close this out by giving [:It isn't just like, it's, it's powerful and almost life changing in some cases. Totally.
It is
the heartbeat
of our company. There's no question about it. Um, every day you'll get. Feedback from users and sometimes it's constructive and I told you about those SWAT teams are trying to figure out things and in record in record time But oftentimes there's also positive feedback that gets funneled programmatically into a channel in our you know, our compliant message board that we call love stories and Everyone has has different sort of favorites here, but Um, I'm, I'm gonna try to pull, I just pulled up a line, one that I don't necessarily, uh, read a lot.
l on forever. Forever, yeah. [:like, oh my gosh. It's forever. Every day we get like, you know, I don't know how many. And every day we might get tens of thousands of bits of feedback from users too. So it's a huge undertaking to even be able to take that feedback and do something with it.
And so much of our work is behind the scenes. You can't see, you know, like all the improvements that we're making. But hopefully you can feel it and hopefully you can measure it. And that's where I think we've been so successful with Head to Heads. But here's a bit of feedback. Um, and it's almost like a story, a little short story.
Um, this comes from a doctor. I don't know what specialty though. He writes, Do you remember the first time you rode a bike? I do. The feeling it gave me was freedom. Climb on my bike and I could get anywhere in a couple minutes, anywhere I wanted to go. As soon as I had a bike, the world was my oyster. I had the same feeling when I commenced with the bridge.
end all my time checking off [:I'm just having a conversation.
It's amazing. That must be really satisfying. Yeah, it's incredible. It's incredible. Chip, thank you. Thank you so much, Bill. Congratulations. It's a
privilege. Thank you.