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Axios spoke with Abridge CEO Shiv Rao about the company's approach to clinical documentation and what's next for AI scribe companies.

Why it matters: Abridge has raised $212.5 million and was valued at $850 million in February 2024.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

How do you incorporate physician feedback into the design of your technology?

"It's nonstop. I'm convinced that no doctor knows how to pronounce an oral oncolytic [oral medications for cancer] — they say these words in all these different ways and they still expect us to recognize their mispronunciations. It's an opportunity for us to differentiate for a health system partner.

"That's part one part of being enterprise-grade, that we can actually tune our models, because we own and control them."

Tell me about your approach to regulation via the FDA. What are you preparing for, especially with regards to this next administration?

"There are certain things on our road map that we need to be prepared minds on. One of those things is around clinical decision support. We don't have that ... feature live today, but we're certainly doing the R&D to be able to deploy that in the future and respond.

"That sort of agentic decision support model obviously has way higher stakes associated with it, and we'd have to be very, very careful in terms of where we point it and in what order.

"In the interim, there's a crawl version of that that ... puts trusted information from Up-To-Date — that every clinician references when they're sort of stumped — puts it in front of [them] in the workflow.

"We're not nudging them, we're not biasing them. We're just sort of trying to support the clinical decision that we see documented."

In terms of bringing some information to the forefront for clinicians, how do you see that influencing the outcome of care?

"I think there's a three-step process for any given use case. [1] If a use case is high-stakes and highly frequent, then you're going to need FDA regulation. [2] How do you measure them? How do you hold them accountable? [3] Will this use case actually improve with more feedback and more data and many use cases?"

What's your plan to keep yourselves differentiated for the next several years?

"The most important thing is innovation and R&D. If you don't get distribution faster than the incumbents get innovation, you're dead."

Abridge CEO Shiv Rao talks medical scribe road map

Abridge has raised $212.5 million and was valued at $850 million in February 2024.

Photo illustration of Abridge CEO Shiv Rao with the Abridge logo and a clipboard.

Photo illustration: Lindsey Bailey/Axios. Photo: Abridge

Axios spoke with Abridge CEO Shiv Rao about the company&#x27;s approach to clinical documentation and what&#x27;s next for AI scribe companies.Why it matters: Abridge has raised $212.5 million and was valued at $850 million in February 2024.

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Abridge CEO Shiv Rao talks medical scribe road map

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