Written by : Jayati Dubey
January 30, 2025
Abridge's new AI tool integrates with Epic’s note drafting workflows for emergency clinicians and functions seamlessly within Epic’s ASAP module on both Haiku and Hyperspace, Epic's mobile and desktop platforms.
Abridge, a leading generative AI company specializing in medical documentation, continues to roll out advanced tools aimed at reducing physician burnout and streamlining clinical workflows.
The company recently introduced Abridge Inside for Emergency Medicine, a generative AI-powered documentation tool designed specifically for emergency care settings.
The product is already in use at major health systems, including Deaconess Health System, Emory Healthcare, Johns Hopkins Medicine, and UChicago Medicine.
This latest innovation was developed as part of Abridge's participation in the Epic Workshop program, a collaboration initiative featuring third-party vendors working alongside Epic Systems, one of the largest electronic health record (EHR) providers.
Emergency medicine clinicians face some of the highest burnout rates in the medical profession, with 63% of emergency physicians experiencing burnout, according to a 2024 Medscape survey.
The fast-paced, unpredictable nature of emergency departments (EDs) often forces clinicians to juggle multiple cases simultaneously while ensuring accurate and comprehensive documentation.
Abridge's new AI tool integrates with Epic’s note drafting workflows for emergency clinicians and functions seamlessly within Epic’s ASAP module on both Haiku and Hyperspace, Epic's mobile and desktop platforms.
Using the system, clinicians can quickly select patients from the Track Board and initiate ambient recordings via Haiku, ensuring real-time documentation.
Shiv Rao, MD, a cardiologist who co-founded Abridge in 2018 and now serves as its CEO, explained that emergency medicine required a different approach due to its unique workflow.
"Emergency medicine is distinct in the way clinicians create documentation. A physician treating a patient with shortness of breath, for example, needs to draft a note that includes a thorough differential diagnosis. Unlike other specialties, emergency care follows a discontinuous workflow—clinicians may step away to attend to another urgent case, order lab tests, or review imaging results before returning to complete a patient’s evaluation. Our AI tool had to be designed to accommodate this chaotic environment and stitch together various interactions into a coherent, structured note," Dr Rao said.
Abridge’s AI technology is built to function seamlessly within Epic’s widely used EHR system.
By leveraging Epic’s existing infrastructure, the AI tool ensures that documentation is efficiently captured, formatted, and integrated into a patient’s medical record without disrupting workflow.
Abridge's AI-powered automatic speech recognition model is designed to detect medical specialties, multiple speakers, and different languages without requiring manual adjustments.
This capability allows clinicians to focus on patient care while the AI generates highly accurate transcripts and structured clinical documentation.
"Abridge Inside has reduced burnout and increased job satisfaction in the Emergency Department without changing anything else," said Tricia Smith, MD, an attending emergency physician at Emory University Hospital Midtown.
"We adopted one technology that truly impacted our work and our patients. I can’t think of a single person using Abridge who would go back to the old way of doing things."
By integrating deeply into Epic’s medical record system, Abridge has ensured that its AI-generated notes meet stylistic and medical-legal compliance standards while maintaining the structured format required for accurate documentation.
Abridge has quickly become a major player in the generative AI medical space. The company has raised $212.5 million in total funding, including a $150 million Series C round in February 2024.
The company’s AI engine processes medical documentation at an unprecedented scale, having been trained on a proprietary dataset of more than 1.5 million medical encounters.
The technology enables real-time conversion of patient-clinician conversations into structured clinical notes, significantly reducing the time physicians spend on administrative tasks.
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