Medical conversation A.I. startup Abridge recently raised $12.5 million in a funding round led by Wittington Ventures. Since its founding in 2018, Abridge has offered an app that uses A.I. and machine learning to allow patients to record their medical conversations. Now, the startup is launching an enterprise solution for healthcare providers, which helps to structure and summarize information from any medical conversation to help reduce physician burnout, while also increasing patient satisfaction. Dr. Shivdev Rao, co-founder and CEO of Abridge, joined Cheddar News' Closing Bell to discuss.

Closing Bell

Abridge Raises $12.5M, Launches Enterprise Solution to Combat Physician Burnout, Help Patients Stay on Top of Their Health

medical conversation aI startup. A bridge raising 12.5 million in a funding round led by winning 10 ventures and since its founding in 2018, bridges offered an app that uses AI and machine learning to allow patients to record their medical conversations. Well, now the startup is launching an enterprise solution for healthcare providers which helps to structure and summarize information from any medical conversation technology, aiming to help reduce physician burnout while also increasing patient satisfaction. And joining me now is dr shiv row co founder and ceo of a bridge doctor, thanks so much for coming on the show. Give me some more details about how this works. Yeah, absolutely. Well, when you think about it, health care delivery for all of us, it's really about conversations upstream of all the testing we get, whether it's a covid test, whether it's a chest x ray upstream of all the therapeutics were prescribed by doctors, whether it's a baby aspirin or some really cutting edge new therapy upstream of everything. There was a conversation that we had with our doctors, with our nurses. So a bridge is first chapter that we launched before that you spoke to really helped people all the patients out there better understand and follow through on their health. And our next chapter, what we just launched is our enterprise chapter where we're finally ready with really deep technology that can be ambient lee inserted into the conversation between a doctor like me, I'm a cardiologist and any patient and then automatically sort of makes sense of the conversation and summarize it and structure information from it. So my usual day to day in a clinic is I go to see patient after patient after patient. I'm writing chicken scratch on a piece of paper as I go from room to room to room. And then at the end of the day I'm trying to I'm trying to piece together those details and write a note and insert it into my med record with this technology. What I've been doing is I just sort of turn it on and it's taking notes like there's someone in the corner of the room just sort of having my back and taking notes in the format that I'm required to document in. How do you protect this data? Doctor? I think for some patients that might be there one concern. Right. Is my data protected by using this technology? Yeah, absolutely. And that's certainly the highest concern for any hospital system out there. So we've built our technology to the highest level of privacy and security specifications that the health care industry prescribes. And so that's not just hipaa It's in the way we encrypt data in rest and in transit where we store it and how we ensure that everything sort of is mapped to the electronic medical record. And so there isn't any sir data floating around because at the end of the day our mission is about helping everyone have better conversations and our mission is to improve the health care delivery experience. So privacy has to be paramount. So as a doctor you clearly have keen insight as to how much this would help. How much time do you think this would save you on an average week? Yeah wow. I mean it's it's it's mind blowing for me personally. So we have this term in healthcare, we call it pajama time where I spend my whole day seeing my patients and I'm optimizing for their experience. So I'm trying not to sort of turn my back towards them and type and I'm trying not to also dictate in front of them. That's sort of the transcription set of solutions that are out there. So what I do instead is I'm taking some chicken scratch notes. And then at the end of the day I'm I'm writing my notes in the electronic medical record and that honestly that takes hours, we have a term for it, we call it pajama time. And so with this technology you just sort of set it and you can sort of forget it from patient from encounter to encounter room to room and it has your back like an intern in the corner of the room. It's not just transcribing. This is way more than that, it's understanding the conversation and it's summarizing it. Okay well $12.5 million. Your company raised. Congratulations, How are you going to use that money to expand? Yeah, absolutely. I think first and foremost we feel like at this moment there is a public health crisis, um there is incredible amounts of provider burnout doctors are burning out, nurses are burning out the pandemic, has has a lot to do with that as well. And so we want to be a part of that solution. We think we can be a huge part of that solution because this is technology that can scale. So first and foremost we're gonna put this capital to good use with our go to market with sales, we're gonna try and integrate it into all the telemedicine conversations that are happening out there call center conversations and people can of course use it in person as well. And then the second piece is we are a deep tech company and we are always innovating. In fact, we've published more peer reviewed papers on this challenge than anyone out there, Any other entity, including the largest technology companies out there and we want to continue to have that lead. So we'll of course continue to invest in key machine learning research dr My final question is how does the AI learn and get better over time that will make your job easier and hopefully care better. Absolutely. I think that's that's an amazing way to sort of, you know, put together the whole story here, you know, when the AI generates a summary and I make edits, it can keep track of those edits and it can optimize it can improve over time and that's a network effect of sorts that just keeps the technology improving continually. But in addition, I think that the ultimate goal here is to help providers have better conversations, help patients have better conversations and what I want more than anything. And I think what most doctors and nurses want more than anything is to have more time to feel like they can really focus on the person who's in front of them. And that's ultimately what this technology provides. All right. Dr shiv Row, co founder and Ceo of a bridge doctor, Thanks for coming on and congratulations.