Abridge Chief Executive Officer Shiv Rao could have been a coder or an actor, but in college, he heard a story about a medical innovation in ophthalmology and decided that medicine was the field for him. From that moment on, his commitment hasn’t wavered.
It wasn’t until 2018, however, while working at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Heart and Vascular Institute, that the specific idea for Abridge came to him. As he recalled in a 2019 interview, he saw a patient who seemed overly anxious and, at the end of her visit, asked if he had done anything to make her feel that way. He hadn’t; it was just that her husband, who usually accompanied her on visits, hadn’t been able to make it.
The issue wasn’t a lack of moral support, however. The patient’s husband usually took copious notes on every visit, allowing them to follow up on each appointment by doing research on their own. It wasn’t a response to Rao’s treatment; it was a response to the health system as a whole. “She’s an English professor at the University of Pittsburgh and told me that it seems as if the whole hospital system has been designed to strip her and other patients of their dignity,” he said.
From that moment, Rao knew what he wanted to do. “We want to help people remember the details, empower them and enable them to share them with others in their network,” he said. “So much of healthcare is about understanding your story and staying on the same page with your caregivers and clinicians. We’re trying to help make that easier for people.”
Six years later, the company’s embrace of artificial intelligence has paid dividends, with Abridge’s accuracy rate registering at 90 percent and counting, as he said earlier this year. The company deployed its platform across Mass General Brigham’s system last year and continues to tweak its methods based on the response of medical professionals. “Their feedback is like oxygen to us,” he said, “and it helps us gain more conviction. It’s also a more profound way to demonstrate that our partnership is impactful. It’s a fruitful collaboration and partnership.”
The platform now operates in 28 languages and could soon roll out to health care centers and other communities, Rao said, as he looks to continue “democratizing” the platform. For as far as he and Abridge have come, there’s still plenty of work to do. “The sky is the limit,” he said.
