Abridge wants to be the operating system for medicine—and NVIDIA and Eli Lilly are helping build it
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. The company’s platform captures conversation between patients and doctors in real time and automatically generates the clinical note, billing codes, and patient summary before the doctor has left the hallway. What’s new is everything that flows from that moment. Before the visit, Abridge surfaces care gaps and prior clinical context for the clinician. During the encounter, the tech suggests discussion topics and surfaces relevant clinical guidelines without requiring the physician to switch applications. After the visit, it generates the documentation, flowsheets, and orders—all grounded in the actual words spoken. “We’ve known all along we wanted to be able to connect the dots across the main stakeholders in healthcare, because the only thing that matters, I think, in terms of AI’s impact on healthcare is business model innovation.” Rao told Fortune. “If we can’t actually improve how healthcare is delivered, how it’s experienced, and how it’s paid for, then we haven’t really moved the needle on the problem.” Behind the platform expansion is a war chest and a set of