No Priors Ep. 108 | With Abridge Founder and CEO Shiv Rao, MD

(instrumental music plays) Hi, listeners, and welcome to No Priors. This week, we're speaking to Shiv Rao, CEO and founder of Abridge, an AI company that processes medical conversations to unburden clinicians from clerical and financial work, allowing them to focus on patient care. A practicing cardiologist at UPMC, Dr. Rao has recently led Abridge to secure a 250 million dollar Series D raise. Join us as we explore how AI is transforming healthcare delivery. Shiv, welcome to No Priors.

So excited to be here. Thank you, Elan. Thank you, Sarah.

So Abridge has been around for about seven years. Um, can you tell us a little bit about how the company has evolved over time, what your starting point was, and what you're focused on now?

Yeah. Absolutely. So we started Abridge in 2018 so it's been a minute. And everything that we've been building since then is really based on the same thesis, so that hasn't changed. And the thesis for us in healthcare delivery is that we don't think doctors or nurses are gonna get fully automated over the next 10 years, and so w- what- what's the first signal in healthcare delivery? And we think it's a conversation. It's the, it's a dialogue between a professional and a patient, and we believe that those dialogues are really upstream of so many workflows in healthcare and- and that's where we focus. And so we focus on clerical work first, but then that's a sort of wedge for us to expand into any- any number of, like, different value propositions over time.

Could you tell us a bit, a little bit more about some of the products that you have currently and how people use them day to day and what sort of customers you work with? Just to give context to our listeners in terms of what business do you have and what do you focus on?

I guess, sort of starting at the top, what we do is we unburden clinicians from all the clerical work that crushes their souls at night, and a little bit more color on that, so two out of five doctors don't want to be doctors in the next two to three years, and 27% of nurses per a JAMA article that was published last year don't want to be nurses in the next 12 months. And so we have this crazy supply-demand mismatch. It's like, it's a really, it's public health emergency. Patients are having to drive five, six hours from rural health settings to see a clinician in an inner city setting that could save their life. And so we've got to do something up, about it, and I think that's where technology has a role that, uh, uh, is finally sort of being recognized and acknowledged at the highest level. Like, uh, uh, the entire healthcare industry understands now they- they- they just need to find a way to assist, augment, and automate any number of different workflows. And so where we come in is that we unburden clinicians from a lot of that clerical work that they hate to do so they can walk in a room, they can, you know, hit Abridge, have a normal conversation, and talk about any number of different topics in whatever order. But when they hit stop and swivel their chair, their note's there. But it's not the note that you might expect, you know, s- that my 14-year-old daughter could sort of create using, you know, an off-the-shelf model. It's a note that checks off all the different boxes across not just who the clinician is, what their specialty is, what system they're a part of, who this patient is, what insurance plan do they have, in what geography, not just like the clinical note but also what the billable note is, if that makes sense.