CHRISTUS Health Reduces Cognitive Load on Clinicians by 78% with Abridge

PITTSBURGH & IRVING, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, Abridge announced an enterprise-wide agreement with CHRISTUS Health, an international, not-for-profit health system based in Texas with 15,000 physicians and more than 600 care centers. With Abridge’s generative AI solution for clinical documentation in use over the last few months, CHRISTUS clinicians have already experienced a significant reduction in burnout and now give more undivided attention to patients.

CHRISTUS Health piloted Abridge earlier this year to study the impact of the generative AI solution on clinicians. The system signed an enterprise-wide agreement following overwhelmingly positive feedback and a study that showed the demonstrable impact of Abridge on clinician wellbeing. Survey results showed the following:

• Significant time savings: Clinicians spent an average of 60% less time on documentation outside of work hours, enabling them to achieve a better work-life balance.
• Reduced burnout: Clinicians saw a 40% decrease in physician burnout rate since deploying Abridge based on the Mini Z Burnout Survey—an industry-validated measure of worklife and wellness in practicing physicians.
• Uninterrupted time with patients: There was a 41% increase in clinicians giving undivided attention to patients, resulting in improved communication and patient satisfaction.

“Abridge has been a game changer. I feel much less distracted with patients since I can focus on the conversation and history without pausing to take extensive notes or re-ask questions I missed during notetaking,” said Dr. Myriah Willborn, family medicine doctor, CHRISTUS Trinity Clinic in Corpus Christi, Texas.

In recent years, cognitive load, which measures the amount of mental effort it takes to complete a task, has been linked to increased rates of burnout and patient safety issues. Traditionally, cognitive load increases when doctors rapidly switch between documentation and patient care. With Abridge, clinicians at CHRISTUS experienced a 78% reduction in cognitive load, contributing to a more focused and efficient approach to patient care.

“I am very excited about our enterprise agreement with Abridge, which we believe is going to transform clinical practice for our ambulatory physicians,” said Dr. Timothy Barker, Ambulatory Chief Medical Information Officer at CHRISTUS Health. “In fact, it is going to be more transformative than anything I have seen in the last 20 years. Time and time again, physicians have told me that Abridge is ‘life changing.’”

Within a few months, CHRISTUS plans to make Abridge available to all ambulatory clinicians.

"The remarkable outcomes and resoundingly positive feedback from clinicians at CHRISTUS Health underscore the profound impact of generative AI on the future of medicine,” said Dr. Shiv Rao, CEO and founder of Abridge. “By alleviating cognitive load and creating space for more meaningful patient interactions, we will improve the lives of clinicians today and draw the next generation of patient care providers to the profession.”

This news follows successful deployments of Abridge at UChicago Medicine, Sutter Health, Yale New Haven Health System, UCI Health, Emory Healthcare, The University of Kansas Health System, UPMC, and dozens of other health systems. Abridge recently announced a $150M Series C financing, which includes a strategic investment from NVIDIA.

About Abridge

Abridge was founded in 2018 with the mission of powering deeper understanding in healthcare. The AI-powered platform was purpose-built for medical conversations, improving clinical documentation efficiencies while enabling clinicians to focus on what matters most—their patients. With support for 14+ languages and 50+ specialties, Abridge is able to support a wide range of clinician and patient encounters.

Abridge’s enterprise-grade technology transforms patient-clinician conversations into structured clinical notes in real-time with deep EMR integrations. Powered by Linked Evidence and their auditable AI, Abridge is the only company that maps AI-generated summaries to ground truth, helping providers quickly trust and verify the output. As pioneers in generative AI for healthcare, Abridge is setting the industry standards for the responsible deployment of AI across health systems.

In a survey by KLAS across multiple systems that have adopted the platform, Abridge scored a 95.3 rating (out of 100) with a grade of A+ on the likelihood to recommend, and time to outcomes being reported as immediate. Abridge was also recently recognized on the 2024 Forbes AI 50 list, alongside companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Databricks, and others.