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Abridge, Teladoc, and Google’s AI Co-Scientist
February 24, 2025
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Together with
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“In this country, we’re not compensated for the care that we deliver. We’re compensated for the care that we documented that we deliver.”
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Abridge CEO Shivdev Rao, MD
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One of the top stories to come out of last week’s ViVE conference was Abridge closing $250M in Series D funding, yet that somehow wasn’t even the biggest news in the announcement.
On top of raising a nine-figure round at a $2.5B valuation, Abridge hit the 100 health system milestone after adding to a string of recent deployments at organizations like Mayo Clinic and Johns Hopkins.
- Newly announced systems included Akron Children’s, Endeavor Health, Inova, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Oak Street Health.
The real headliner was the debut of Abridge’s new Contextual Reasoning Engine, “an AI architecture that produces more clinically useful and billable notes at the point of care.”
The Contextual Reasoning Engine bolsters Abridge’s generative AI platform for clinical conversations with:
- Contextual awareness – integrates data from retrospective patient encounters, health system-specific revenue cycle guidelines, and clinician documentation preferences to create more comprehensive notes.
- Problem detection – recognizes and groups medical problems, describing them with language that aligns with appropriate billing codes.
- Actionable outputs – captures medical orders and integrates them into the EHR for clinician review.
Ambient scribing has been one of the hottest segments in digital health, helping clinicians spend more face-time with patients and less pajama time on administrative tasks.
- That’s led to rapid adoption from providers, but it’s also caused plenty of vendors with core competencies outside of scribing to bolt the functionality onto their feature sets.
- As a result, ambient AI startups are moving beyond clinical documentation to differentiate themselves with new use cases like coding or clinical decision support – and Abridge’s Contextual Reasoning Engine is only just the beginning.
The Takeaway
The ambient AI market is at an inflection point, and companies like Abridge are quickly raising capital and pouring it straight into R&D to own the workflows downstream from documentation. It’s a race to outrun commoditization and reach distribution before incumbents can catch up, and Abridge now has another $250M to help pick up the pace.
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2025 State of Payer Enrollment & Credentialing
With increasing costs and shifting regulations, outdated processes won’t cut it. Medallion’s new report breaks down the biggest challenges, emerging trends, and how automation is transforming the landscape. Get the insights you need – read the full report today.
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New Abridge AI Infrastructure Powers Clinically Useful and Billable Notes
The new Abridge Contextual Reasoning Engine is a leap forward in AI architecture that enables clinically useful and billable notes at the point of care. Health systems are plagued by incomplete notes that delay billing processes. Generating comprehensive, billable notes that support appropriate claims at the point of care creates administrative efficiencies, reducing costs and freeing doctors to focus more on patient care. Learn more.
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- Teladoc Gets Targeted: Teladoc shares were hammered nearly 20% last week after a short-seller report alleged that BetterHelp therapists use AI to communicate with patients who think they’re speaking with an actual human. The report featured several messages between patients and therapists that seemingly confirm this is happening, although it isn’t clear how widespread the issue is. A few BetterHelp therapists admitted to using AI due to heavy workloads and incentives tied to the number of words they type. Tough look all around.
- Hims Acquires Trybe: Hims & Hers scooped up at-home testing startup Trybe, accelerating its expansion into whole body diagnostics and new categories like low testosterone and menopausal support. The acquisition adds to Hims’ ongoing M&A spree that most recently included an outsourcing facility to ramp up its pharmacy compounding capabilities, a questionably-timed move given that the FDA just put an end to the compounded GLP-1 market by declaring that the semaglutide shortage is now over.
- Willingness to Share Health Data: New research in JAMIA showed that consumers fall into three distinct cohorts when it comes to their willingness to share health data. The analysis of Rock Health survey data showed that 15% of respondents were Permissive (broadly willing to share health data), while 48% were Discerning (open to sharing with family or clinicians, but not with companies or researchers). The remaining 37% were Wary, or consistently against sharing data (this group was more likely to be younger and uninsured).
- Google Introduces AI Co-Scientist: Google introduced its new AI co-scientist, a multi-agent generative AI system that can help scientists generate novel hypotheses and research proposals. AI co-scientist is designed to “mirror the reasoning process underpinning the scientific method” and is purpose-built for collaboration. It not only performs standard literature review and summarization, but can reportedly formulate demonstrably novel hypotheses by building upon prior evidence and tailoring it to specific research objectives.
- Hummingbird Series B: Managed services startup Hummingbird Healthcare closed $20M of Series B funding to support health systems looking to improve patient access by scaling technology, processes, and people. Hummingbird helps its partners standardize both primary care and specialty patient access services into centralized contact centers while optimizing their tech stacks.
- AI Beats Long Wait Times: RevSpring’s AI Patient Engagement Pulse survey revealed that one in five U.S. patients would rather speak to an AI than a human by phone for routine tasks like checking balances due – assuming it resulted in faster service – while 32% are at least open to it (they would either prefer AI or have no preference). The patients most inclined to prefer AI include those ages 35-54 (25%), those with a four-year education (30%), and those making $80k or more per year (27%).
- Keebler Seeds Risk Adjustment: AI risk adjustment startup Keebler Health landed a $6M seed round to accelerate its product roadmap amid surging demand from providers in value-based care arrangements. The Keebler platform ingests patient medical records to identify missed conditions, recommend next steps to care teams, and optimize reimbursement from payors (the automated medical review reportedly identifies 15-30% more disease burden).
- Physicians Flee Post-PE: A new study in JAMA Health Forum documents what looks like an exodus of physicians from practices acquired and then sold by private equity investors. In a survey of 1.2k physicians, doctors working at practices that PE investors had offloaded were 17 percentage points less likely to be working there two years after PE’s exit. What’s more, departing physicians were more likely to join large practices, accelerating market concentration.
- Karoo + Zing: VBC enablement company Karoo Health and Medicare Advantage payor Zing Health are partnering to bring value-based cardiovascular care to six new states. The duo is aiming to improve outcomes by combining Karoo’s 700+ cardiology provider partners and AI-powered care model with Zing’s “best-in-class member experience” for underserved seniors managing chronic conditions. Karoo will now be available to Zing’s MA members in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Ohio, and Tennessee.
- Millie Closes $12M: Tech-enabled maternity clinic Millie closed a $12M Series A funding round to expand its platform and physical footprint. Millie’s “midwifery-led” model delivers care virtually through its app or at one of its California-based clinics, offering everything from prenatal education and lactation support to mental health counseling and gynecological care. The startup also partners with local health systems and accepts all major commercial health plans in addition to Medicaid.
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Top Systems Scale Primary Care With K Health
Leading health systems are turning to K Health’s AI-driven primary care solution to give their patients access to high-quality care with wait times measured in hours, not months. Find out why K Health is the only clinical AI company partnering with top systems to scale fully integrated primary care experiences.
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BPM Pro 2: Unparalleled Reliability
BPM Pro 2 increases data reliability with two new features that ensure patients are taking their reading properly and prompting them to rest and retake it if their first reading was abnormally high.
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- The First 30 Days: What to Expect With AI: Implementing AI documentation tools promises significant benefits, but how do you ensure a smooth transition? Playback Health has you covered with this comprehensive 30-day roadmap outlining what to expect, industry best practices, and its own proven implementation approach.
- Bridging Care Gaps for Underserved Populations: Is your health system, rural health clinic, or federally qualified health center struggling to reach patients with obstacles to receiving in-person care? This Clear Arch Health whitepaper explores how combining RPM with VBC can help facilitate proactive interventions, address social determinants of health, and get the most out of new CMS reimbursement pathways.
- HIMSS CMIO Roundtable – Ambient AI: Nabla is hosting a CMIO Roundtable at HIMSS – and you’re invited. The panel will dive into how ambient AI adoption has evolved, what clinicians expect next in terms of expanded capabilities and ROI, and its transformative potential in areas like Revenue Cycle Management and Clinical Documentation Improvement. Grab a spot here.
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