Sutter Health, one of Northern California's largest healthcare providers, is teaming up with Abridge, a healthcare AI startup focused on clinical documentation, to offer the genAI service to its physicians and clinicians across the state.

The aim of the technology is to reduce the time required by medical professionals to complete administrative tasks including writing clinical notes.

WHY THIS MATTERS
The Abridge AI platform is tailored for medical conversations and supported by electronic health record integrations. It can convert patient-clinician conversations into structured clinical notes in real time.

The AI-generated summaries are mapped to ground truth with Linked Evidence technology to ensure accuracy.

Sutter's partnership with Abridge will also see the integration of patient-facing summaries in the EHR.

Following successful implementations at Yale New Haven Health System, UCI Health, Emory Healthcare, the University of Kansas Health System, UPMC and numerous other health systems, Abridge also secured a $150 million Series C financing.

That included a strategic investment from NVIDIA to expedite a research and development agenda to scale up the clinical conversation platform across the broader U.S. healthcare system.

Abridge uses NVIDIA's latest NIM inference microservices, integrated into the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform and built upon the company's TensorRT large language model to power its deep learning stack.

THE LARGER TREND
Since 2018, healthcare workforce burnout rates have risen, though they began stabilizing in late 2022, according to a January report from KLAS.

The use of AI and generative AI could help reduce growing levels of burnout among healthcare professionals.

Some experts have posited that an AI tool capable of generating an initial draft of a SOAP note, for example, which would then be subject to caregiver approval or editing, could significantly reduce clinicians' workload, saving them considerable time.

In an interview with HealthcareITNews in August 2023, Abridge founder and CEO Dr. Shiv Rao said AI-powered automation could have a huge impact on the demands of manual documentation and coding.

"If we could provide a magnitude greater speed and lower cost, turning patient conversation into highly professional notes with quality and accuracy, that we could refocus our profession on what matters most – being present and listening," he said.

Trained on vast data sets, genAI holds significant promise in data-rich healthcare. An October 2023 report forecast that the technology within healthcare alone would surge to a $22 billion industry by 2032.

This growth would be aided by the formation of strategic partnerships among a growing cohort of companies integrating solutions into drug discovery, diagnostics, patient care and claims management.

Earlier this month, NVIDIA launched 25 new genAI microservices aimed at diverse healthcare applications to facilitate integration of AI into both cloud-based and on-premises systems, targeting genomics, imaging, drug discovery and other digital health needs.

Oracle has also introduced a genAI tool and additional enhancements to its Data Intelligence Cloud Suite, bolstering Oracle Health Data Intelligence with performance enhancements, prebuilt clinical quality analytics and automated alerts to improve reimbursements and care quality.

ON THE RECORD
"We want to support our clinicians so they can sustainably serve our patients," said Dr. Albert Chan, Sutter Health's chief health information officer, in a statement about the new genAI work. "Reducing administrative burden by two to three hours a day with Abridge can reduce the time our clinicians have historically spent away from their families and help our providers recharge and be the best versions of themselves when caring for patients."

Nathan Eddy is a healthcare and technology freelancer based in Berlin.
Email the writer: nathaneddy@gmail.com
Twitter: @dropdeaded209