Sharp HealthCare Chooses Abridge for Clinical Documentation, Enabling Clinicians to Focus on Care—Not Coding

“Every AI solution needs to justify its cost with significant ROI. If an AI solution demonstrates sustained clinical and financial impact, it will make it into enterprise-wide adoption. In our personal lives, we live like the Jetsons, but at work, we’re stuck in the Flintstones era. That’s what we’re changing.” —Dan Exley, Chief Information and Innovation Officer of Sharp HealthCare

SAN DIEGO & SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sharp HealthCare, the largest integrated health system in San Diego, is implementing the Abridge generative AI platform across the enterprise to create comprehensive, compliant, and billable documentation, enabling clinicians to fully focus on caring for patients. Abridge will now be deployed across Sharp HealthCare locations, which support more than one million patients annually.

Medical records serve many purposes and stakeholders. They are the health record for patients, a guide for other clinicians on the care team, and a part of how clinicians receive compensation for the care provided.

“If you didn't write it down, it didn't happen,” said Dr. Brian Lichtenstein, a hospitalist and Associate Chief Medical Information Officer (CMIO) of Acute Care at Sharp HealthCare. “With Abridge, we’re picking up on additional conditions our clinicians are treating that might have otherwise been lost. Even when you're trying to be exhaustive in your notes, you may document eight of ten things that you did, which is good, but getting all ten is great and helps us realize more of the value of what we deliver.”

Abridge’s capability to support clinicians and health systems in capturing all of the value they deliver is enabled by the platform’s Contextual Reasoning Engine, an AI architecture that generates compliant, structured, and billable notes, in real-time, at the point of care.

“A colleague told me that Abridge more completely captures all the work he is doing,” said Dr. Elan Hekier, Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine Physician and CMIO of Sharp Rees-Stealy Medical Group, a Sharp HealthCare physician practice. “It even captured a diagnosis he says he would have missed. It was during the exam and he had forgotten about it by the end of the long visit. But Abridge appropriately added that diagnosis.”

Following a pilot in which Abridge was rigorously tested across specialties, languages, and care settings, Sharp HealthCare clinicians experienced:

• 83% reduction in note-writing effort
• 83% increase in work satisfaction
• 75% increase in note quality

This data was collected using a pre-post survey and included a self-reported 10% increase in clinicians’ ability to see additional patients that needed urgent attention.

“I’m Spanish-speaking, and sometimes I speak in Spanglish with my patients. Abridge’s HPI and A&P always pick up way more than I used to catch, regardless of the language,” said Dr. Nicole Tremain, an internal medicine clinician as well as Associate CMIO at the Sharp Community Medical Group, another Sharp HealthCare physician practice.

Abridge is now trusted by more than 100 of the largest and most complex health systems to deliver highly accurate clinical documentation relied upon by clinicians, patients, and revenue cycle professionals every day.

“Enterprise-grade healthcare AI removes barriers between patients and clinicians and delivers ROI for healthcare systems,” said Dr. Shiv Rao, CEO and Founder of Abridge. “The clinicians and AI scientists who designed Abridge understand the anxiety creating compliant, billable documentation can cause among clinicians—our mission is to relieve that burden so they can focus on delivering exceptional patient care.”

About Sharp HealthCare
Sharp HealthCare, San Diego's largest and most comprehensive health care delivery system, is recognized for clinical excellence in cardiac, cancer, multi-organ transplantation, neuroscience, orthopedics, rehabilitation, behavioral health, women's health and hospice services. Sharp HealthCare has been widely acclaimed for its commitment to transform the health care experience for patients, physicians and staff through an organization-wide performance improvement initiative called The Sharp Experience. The Sharp HealthCare system includes four acute-care hospitals, four specialty hospitals, three affiliated medical groups, a health plan and numerous outpatient facilities and programs, including the Sharp Prebys Innovation & Education Center. To learn more about Sharp, visit Sharp Health News.

About Abridge
Abridge was founded in 2018 to power deeper understanding in healthcare. The enterprise-grade AI platform transforms medical conversations into clinically useful and billable documentation at the point of care, reducing administrative burden and clinician burnout while improving patient experience. With deep EHR integration, support for 28+ languages, and 50+ specialties, Abridge is used across a wide range of care settings, including outpatient, emergency department, and inpatient.

Abridge’s enterprise-grade AI platform is purpose-built for healthcare. Supported by Linked Evidence, Abridge is the only solution that maps AI-generated summaries to source data, helping clinicians quickly trust and verify the output. As a pioneer in generative AI for healthcare, Abridge is setting the industry standard for the responsible deployment of AI across health systems.

Abridge was recently awarded Best in KLAS for Ambient AI segment in addition to other accolades, including TIME Best Inventions of 2024, 2024 Forbes AI 50 List, and Fortune’s 2024 AI 50 Innovators.