On Thursday morning in New York City, Dr. Shiv Rao stood before a room of health system executives and made a case that ambient AI—a technology that began largely as a transcription tool—was ready to do something far more consequential than writing a doctor’s notes.
Abridge, the startup Rao cofounded in 2018, announced a strategic investment from drugmaker Eli Lilly and what it is calling the first AI-native clinician intelligence platform: a system that both documents the patient-clinician conversation and uses it as the foundation for billing, clinical decision support, payer adjudication, and pharmaceutical trial screening. More than 300 health systems—including Northwestern Medicine, Emory Healthcare, and Johns Hopkins—are already live on the platform, supporting upward of 100 million clinical conversations annually and serving more than 250 million patients.
