IKS Health and Abridge partner on AI for stopping provider burnout

Along with the partnership, IKS also made an undisclosed investment in Abrdge

Generative AI tools have the power to transform the healthcare industry by off-roading standard questions that patients have to chatbots, taking some of the burden off of healthcare professionals, who have become increasingly burned out.

Abridge was already doing this by creating a generative AI solution that records and highlights the most important part of doctor appointments for patients, while also automatically creating a draft note of the conversation in the standardized format for doctors to review. The idea is to help patients better understand the details of the appointments, while also making it easier for doctors to review and understand what's happening with their patients. 

On Thursday, Abridge announced a partnership with provider enablement platform IKS Health, along with an undisclosed amount of funding, that will help advance its technology even further.

Founded in 2018, Abridge's initial product was aimed at patients, using machine learning to give users a transcript of the medical parts of their appointments, highlighting important definitions and takeaways, such as what next steps a patient is supposed to take, or instructions on how to properly take their medication. 

Its enterprise solution, meanwhile, breaks down the conversation into different headings including social history, which can include the patient's alcohol usage and smoking; diagnostics and appointments, including when and where the patient should be going for follow-ups; and medications that the physician prescribed during the visit. 

The company's dataset is derived from more than 1.5 million medical encounters, and Abridge has already helped more than 2,000 clinicians with their enterprise solutions.

IKS Health was founded in 2006 and its platform offers health systems clinical, financial and administrative solutions with the goal of improving operational efficiency, better patient outcomes, optimized productivity, and revenue.

For IKS, the benefit of working Abridge is that it can use its technology to highlight efficiencies in its clinical documentation services; for Abridge, IKS will help accelerate the development of Abridge’s core AI technologies by contributing feedback from its workforce of over 6,500 medical professionals, which includes over 1,300 physicians and over 300 technology experts. 

The mission of both companies is to eliminate administrative work and to help mitigate the rising rates of burnout among clinicians that is leading many to exit the healthcare workforce. 

At the same time, both IKS and Abridge say they are "committed to Responsible AI principles and, most critically, the highest healthcare industry standards for data privacy and security."  

"The most important relationship in healthcare is between the patient and the provider, and this is also the most compromised one today due to the mounting administrative burden on providers. Our goal is to assist clinicians by taking away and assisting them with the administrative chores and enable them to focus on their core value of building trusted relationships with their patients in order to drive better clinical outcomes,” Sachin K. Gupta, founder and CEO of IKS, said in a statement.

“Our partnership with Abridge will transform how generative AI will be leveraged in a pragmatic, provider-ready solution that enables them to deliver better, safer and more efficient care at scale."