Duke Health and Abridge partner on AI for clinical documentation

Duke University Hospital

Photo: Courtesy Duke Health

Duke Health is the latest health system to partner with Abridge on generative AI for clinical documentation.

Duke Health, headquartered in North Carolina, and Abridge signed an enterprise-wide agreement in late December to deploy the AI platform to 5,000 clinicians at more than 150 primary and specialty clinics.

The news was announced on Thursday.

The platform will be used throughout Duke Health Integrated Practice and Duke Primary Care clinics to document conversations between the patient and clinician during appointments. Clinicians review the notes and can edit them before they are integrated into the patient record and EHR.

The AI platform is designed to help alleviate burnout by reducing the time clinicians spend on documentation.

"As a leading academic medical center, the drive to improve patient care is part of Duke Health's DNA," said Dr. Matthew Barber, interim senior vice president of Duke Health Integrated Practice. "With this platform at our disposal, our clinicians are able to focus more fully on patients and less on documentation, restoring what the patient-clinician relationship is supposed to be about."

In addition, Duke is exploring opportunities with Abridge to co-develop other clinical applications that use ambient AI, Abridge said.

WHY THIS MATTERS

Numerous health systems use Abridge for generative AI in clinical conversations. 

Abridge's platform is being deployed in all care settings and specialties at Johns Hopkins Medicine. In early December, Abridge finalized the agreement with Johns Hopkins Medicine to implement the ambient AI platform across its 6,700 clinicians, six hospitals and 40 patient-care centers. 

In August, Kaiser Permanente contracted with Abridge to make AI clinical documentation available to its 40 hospitals and over 600 medical offices. 

The Mayo Clinic, Epic and Abridge partnered on a generative AI ambient documentation workflow for nurses in July. 

Abridge, founded in 2018, has also formed partnerships with Wolters Kluwer, OpenNotes and other healthcare organizations. 

Earlier this year, Abridge announced a $150M Series C financing, which includes a strategic investment from NVIDIA, a California-based company that develops and deploys AI-powered autonomous machines and edge computing applications.

THE LARGER TREND

Other health systems using Abridge's AI platform include Corewell Health, Riverside Health, Reid Health, University of Vermont Health Network, CHRISTUS Health, Sutter Health, Yale New Haven Health System, UCI Health, Emory Healthcare, the University of Kansas Health System and UPMC.

A pilot program using the generative AI platform showed improvement in both patient satisfaction and clinician experiences at the University of Chicago Medicine, according to Abridge.

Email the writer: SMorse@himss.org