Q&A with Abridge’s new clinician scientist

For the last eight years Michal Nedoszytko has worked as an interventional cardiologist in Belgium. But in between appointments, he was coding a product that could transcribe and summarize patient appointments.

The platform was called PostVisit.ai, and would use appointment information to help patients understand their diagnosis and act on treatments. Nedoszytko says he wanted to fill the gaps in care patients experience once they leave the office—a time often riddled with confusion.

“The solution allows the patient to understand what happened, after the visit,” he told us. “Because when the patient leaves, he’s on his own, he doesn’t understand what medication he needs to take, he doesn’t really understand what the physician explained to him.”

The system does this by listening to the patient and doctor during an appointment, building a transcript, accessing electronic health record data, and then introducing a digital assistant that can speak with the patient about their care.

In February, PostVisit.ai won third place in Anthropic’s hackathon, which put Nedoszytko in front of many leaders in health tech, including Abridge’s founder Shiv Rao.

Long story short, they really hit it off, and Nedoszytko decided to leave his career in Europe and move stateside to become a clinician scientist at Abridge. He’s been in the role since May.

Nedoszytko spoke with us about this career transition and about what he hopes to accomplish at the leading AI scribe company.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why did you want to work with Abridge?

They shared the same philosophy about conversation being the ultimate context. I believe that most of the interaction that is happening in healthcare revolves around this conversation between the doctor and the patient. This is the source of truth, and this is the most essential element of data that then can be expanded with additional context. But everything revolves around the conversation.

What are your goals at Abridge?

My goal was unburdening physicians from everything administrative. I did that, but on a much smaller scale back in Europe. At Abridge I’m continuing to evolve this. I joined three projects, and we are evolving them very, very fast. Elements that require intelligence and help with where data is missing and where we can pull it and help the physicians and the doctor, this is what we are creating. So it involves clinical decision support systems, clinical trial matching, real-time voice operating and interacting with the healthcare record.

Long term, how do you see this technology being used in healthcare?

The technology will just blend in. What we will see is that we will have more time and focus, so we will be able to concentrate more on being there in the moment with our patient, which is already happening. This is just a starting point. Clinical intelligence unburdens the other very difficult administrative elements, like prior authorization, finance, insurance. We are also on track currently for AI to be a silent assistant that will help us to focus more on the case. Sometimes in the noise we might omit certain information, we might not ask a certain question…and AI will help us regain this focus. So I believe it’s going to help us, maybe not cognitively, but as an assistant that guides us by the hand. Because the role of the doctor has changed. We became scribes, we became secretaries, we became everything that we weren’t trained for, and our goal is actually to diagnose, treat, and help the patient.