Abridge lays out road map for all-in-one clinical platform

Having secured a spot at the sides of doctors everywhere, Abridge is now aiming to do more than simply take notes on their conversations.

In fact, the $5.3 billion-valued startup’s ambitions extend beyond clinical settings alone to insurers and drugmakers. It wants to become a platform that connects these three nodes of the healthcare industry, supporting clinical decisions, suggesting billing codes, and flagging patients for potential pharmaceutical trials.

Abridge CEO Shiv Rao detailed this vision before a crowd of health professionals at a recent event in Manhattan. The company announced it would work with Nvidia to develop a specialized new healthcare model and partner with Eli Lilly, which is making a strategic investment of an undisclosed amount in Abridge. Cigna and Aetna execs took the stage alongside health system leaders.

“The core thesis has been that conversations are a core signal that’s upstream in healthcare, and that they’re computable,” Rao told us in an interview after the keynote. “And if they’re computable, you can build a platform. And if you’re in that moment, then you can bend their trajectory for what happens next.”

All this comes as competition is heating up in the ambient scribe space, especially since the inevitable entrance of electronic health records (EHR) giant Epic Systems into the AI tools race last fall. Tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon have also been expanding both their consumer- and provider-side offerings, and the biggest AI labs are starting to wade into the space, as well.

“Clearly the EHR vendors are probably the most substantial competitive risk for the scribes, so staying that much in front in terms of capabilities, and not having just a point solution [is important],” Brian Wright, PitchBook’s lead research analyst for healthcare, told Morning Brew. “All the way from the notetaking to the clinical decision support to the revenue cycle management, having a fully integrated agentic solution…you have to have that in order to compete with the EHR vendors.”

Abridge so far

According to a report last fall from Menlo Ventures, Abridge accounts for around 30% of the $600 million ambient scribe market, clocking in just short of Microsoft’s 33% share. The company has been laying the groundwork for a more expanded platform for months with revenue cycle management partnerships and its Contextual Reasoning Engine that helps automate workflows.

The proprietary model that Abridge plans to build with Nvidia could also help differentiate the company. Rather than developing a foundation model from scratch, Abridge will train and fine-tune on top of Nvidia’s open-weights Nemotron family of models using Abridge’s own de-identified data. Rao said Abdrige will continue to use a mix of its own models and those from labs like OpenAI and Anthropic.

“We can distill and fine-tune and post-train to get those models to do the specific jobs that we care about, that allow us to ship the best product,” Rao said.

While those same AI labs have recently made their own forays into healthcare, Rao said it would be a mistake to view them as competitors.

“We shouldn’t ever be in an adversarial competitive position with the frontier labs,” he said. “What we recognize in our industry is the opportunity and the mandate is to go millions of miles deep, get into workflows, get into minutia, get into proprietary data, get into integrations, get into a partner success motion, get into all the things that are hard to do at scale and that require a lot of trust, and we’ve been able to earn a lot of trust over these years.”

On the life sciences side, Rao said a “top-of-mind use case” for the Eli Lilly partnership is recruiting for clinical trials: “We’re hoping that will be an opportunity that we would be able to explore,” he said.

Abridge also announced new content partnerships with professional orgs like the American Diabetes Association and medical publications like the Journal of Clinical Oncology, as well as integrations with virtual healthcare platforms Artisight and Hellocare.

PitchBook’s Wright said Abridge might consider eventually acquiring this type of smart hospital room technology. “That’s a very important technology that needs to be in-house rather than outsourced for a partnership,” he said. “If I’m them, I buy Artisight.”

Converging platforms

Andreas Cleve, co-founder and CEO of healthcare foundation model maker Corti, said it makes sense that ambient scribes are looking downstream toward assigning medical codes and other payment administrative tasks as ways to expand their platforms.

“It’s back-office, it’s invisible. It feels like a cost line item,” Cleve said. “I have never heard a hospital CEO or provider, CMO, or CIO talk about the coding staff as revenue-generating, although they are.”

Cleve said he thinks that EHR vendors like Epic will have a comparative advantage when it comes to building out agentic workflows because of their “much larger compliance teams” that will ease moves into heavily regulated spaces. He also expects prices for scribes to drop steeply in the next six to eight months as competition increases.

Wright said he expects to see the market for these kinds of tools consolidate as the different players start to converge on the same types of far-reaching platforms.

“It’s not just the EHR vendors, but also the data analytics platforms,” Wright said. “They’re all going after the same customer base, and the technology is making it such that they longitudinally need to be able to to have a fully integrated offering to compete. I think the providers are going to consolidate around a much smaller number of technology vendors.”