Yale New Haven Health partners with AI company on ambient listening tech

HBJ FILE PHOTO Yale New Haven Health

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Abridge AI Inc., a Pittsburgh-based developer of an AI-driven platform that converts patient-doctor conversations into note form, said Friday it has signed an agreement with Yale New Haven Health System, while also receiving another $150 million investment.

Abridge said the new enterprise agreement with Yale New Haven Health, the largest healthcare system in Connecticut, will give thousands of clinicians access to Abridge for clinical documentation. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Yale New Haven Health selected Abridge as its generative AI partner in the area of ambient listening, the company said. Using the platform will help doctors spend more time engaging with patients, it added.

“Freeing doctors from the burden of documentation will dramatically improve both quality of care and the doctor-patient relationship,” said Paul Ricci, advisor for Lightspeed Venture Partners and former chairman and CEO of Nuance Communications. “Abridge will allow caregivers to capture an enormous amount of data that is currently being discarded or ignored, and that in turn will likely lead to new insights in managing population health.”

In addition to the new agreement, Abridge said the $150 million in Series C funding comes just four months after its $30 million Series B financing round. The investment is one of the largest funding rounds to date in generative AI for healthcare, company officials said.

The latest investment was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, which will also join Abridge’s board of directors. Other investors included co-lead Redpoint Ventures, with support from IVP, Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Wittington Ventures, Mass General Brigham Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation Fund (AIDIF), Kaiser Permanente Ventures, and CVS Health Ventures.

Founded in 2018, Abridge said its speech and language technologies have been tested in 14 languages and support many more, “performing well even amid rapid switches between languages and when interpreters are in the room.”

Abridge said the new capital investment will be used for fundamental research as it develops “foundation models that draw upon vast troves of multimodal healthcare data.” The models will both power improvements to Abridge’s existing product lines and enable new possibilities in the future.

“We are grateful to be partnering with iconic institutions that share our dedication to improving the lives of patients and clinicians,” said Dr. Shiv Rao, Abridge’s founder and CEO.