Abridge dives deeper into clinical decision support with NEJM, AMA

AI scribe developer Abridge is entering into content partnerships with the NEJM Group and the American Medical Association to enhance its clinical decision support capability.

The AI scribing tool's clinical decision support feature itself is not new; however, the partnerships will broaden clinicians' access to up-to-date clinical evidence, according to Matt Troup, director of clinical strategy at Abridge. The NEJM Group publishes the New England Journal of Medicine, while the American Medical Association publishes the JAMA Network, which includes JAMA, JAMA Network Open and 11 other specialty journals.

"There's more knowledge available than there's ever been before, more complexity than there's ever been before," Troup said in an interview with Health IT and EHR. "We want to make sure that we are getting clinicians access to just the latest possible information that exists. So, when they're making their decisions for the patient that they're caring for, they have access to that. And there's no better opportunity than to draw from the content of the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA."

The partnerships add to the clinical evidence already available to clinicians through the Abridge tool. The tool currently includes insights from Wolters Kluwer's UpToDate platform, and the content integrations with NEJM and JAMA will become available in the coming months.

Troup noted that the clinical decision support capability aims to support clinicians before, during and after patient visits. For example, before a patient visit, the clinician can use the capability to prepare by asking questions about the patient's medical issues and reviewing the latest evidence.

Additionally, the capability can highlight clinical evidence during a patient encounter as it listens to the encounter, enabling clinicians to create and adjust treatment plans. After the visit,the capability can pull up relevant evidence to for further context.

Abridge not only aims to alleviate clinicians' administrative burden by bringing clinical decision support into the medical visit workflow, but also to personalize care by providing evidence-based information tailored to each patient's needs. Troup emphasized that because the tool can gather information from physician-patient conversations, it can provide contextual information to support the patient's care.

"What this really means for us is the opportunity to build a platform and an interactive layer of intelligence for the clinician that's using Abridge," Troup said. "And so, it goes from us just solely being able to generate a note as an output, to being able to actually serve the clinician for all of the tasks that they need to complete for that visit."

Adding new capabilities and enhancing existing ones are essential for health IT companies looking to succeed in a market that is flooded with solutions. In recent months, several companies announced expanded capabilities.

For instance, OpenEvidence, a large language model-based search engine for clinicians, has added AI coding as well as prescription generation and prior authorization submission capabilities in an effort to ease clinical documentation, revenue cycle management and prescribing burdens.

Similarly, EHR giants have been rapidly introducing new AI capabilities to automate various aspects of clinical care. From Epic to athenahealth to MEDITECH, EHRs are building new features or partnering with health AI companies to add them on. 

These recent launches and releases indicate a move beyond point solutions, in which vendors are looking to support large stretches of the clinician experience rather than automating a single process. This appears to be Abridge's goal as well.  

"We're absolutely moving towards becoming a platform interaction for clinicians where, the way I think about it and we think about it as clinicians at Abridge, is if I walk into the room and I'm about to either prep for a patient, I'm going to have a conversation with the patient or wrapping up the tasks I need to complete as that clinic visit finishes, what are all the ways in which Abridge can alleviate that administrative burden from clinicians?" Troup said.  

Anuja Vaidya has covered the healthcare industry since 2012. She currently covers the virtual healthcare landscape, including telehealth, remote patient monitoring and digital therapeutics.