With Local Pathways, the Abridge Assistant Cites a Health System’s Own Guidance in Every Moment of Care

The Abridge Assistant contextualizes institution-specific care pathways alongside evidence-based medical literature within clinicians’ existing workflows and security framework

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Abridge today announced support for local pathways, a new capability within the Abridge Assistant that brings a health system’s preferred care plans into responses alongside relevant medical literature. Clinicians across more than 300 enterprise health systems representing over 250 million patients have adopted the Abridge Assistant since its launch earlier this year. Health systems’ pathways translate medical guidelines into a shared, consistent approach to treating patients with the goal of improving the consistency of care.

While health systems invest deeply in developing that guidance for clinicians, it’s often not easily discoverable in the moment it’s needed, requiring searches through PDFs, websites, intranets, or SharePoint libraries. The Assistant is already connected to the patient’s chart and the clinician’s existing workflow, which means these pathways are contextualized to the patient in front of them.

“Health systems have put years of clinical expertise into defining how they can best care for their patients, and those pathways should be accessible when a clinician is making a decision,” said Dr. Shiv Rao, CEO and Co-Founder of Abridge and a practicing cardiologist. “With local pathways, a clinician doesn’t have to go searching for the next step. We are bringing that institutional knowledge into the same Assistant, and into the same workflow, that clinicians use to understand the patient and consult the evidence. Our goal is to help turn a health system’s standards of care into more consistent care for the patient in the moment and, ultimately, to improve patient outcomes.”

Making health systems’ existing guidance easier to find

The Abridge Assistant already supports clinicians within their existing workflow, helping them prepare for upcoming patients by summarizing what has changed since they last spoke across prior visits and clinicians, rounds, labs, and vitals. It runs pre-filled medical calculators, drafts handoff letters, and responds to clinical questions with cited sources tailored to the context of the patient’s medical chart. The integration of local pathways is a natural next step in that experience: an institution-specific layer of guidance alongside the patient context and published evidence clinicians already consult.

“As Chief Medical Informatics and AI Officer and a practicing physician, I want Abridge Assistant to reduce the work around clinical decisions—not replace the judgment behind them,” said Dr. Deepti Pandita, Chief Medical Informatics and AI Officer, University of California Irvine Health. “For local pathways, that means helping clinicians spend less time searching for guidance and more time considering what is right for the patient in front of them. The measure of success for me is whether this fits naturally into their workflow, makes the source easy to review, and leaves clinicians in control of the care they deliver.”

When an applicable institutional pathway is identified, the Assistant surfaces the relevant content from the pathway with a link to the original source, so clinicians can review the full guidance. Clinicians review the source and determine how the pathway applies to the individual patient, using their own clinical judgment.

The Abridge Assistant runs on enterprise-grade infrastructure that has already passed each institution’s security review and data governance requirements. Health systems can enable the Assistant for every clinician through their existing Abridge deployment.

The inclusion of local pathways in the Abridge Assistant was designed to make institutional expertise more accessible within the care workflow and support clinicians in delivering high-quality care. For example, when an infant presents to the emergency department with a fever, a clinician can review the health system’s pathway, which sets out which evaluation is indicated at that age and which next steps depend on those results.

“The opportunity is to make local clinical guidance easier to access at the point of care, while keeping clinicians’ judgment central to how that guidance applies to each patient,” said Dr. Abiodun Omoloja, Chief Medical Informatics Officer at Dayton Children's Hospital.

To learn more about Abridge Assistant, visit abridge.com/assistant/.

About Abridge

Founded in 2018, Abridge is the first AI-native clinician intelligence platform organized around the patient, built for clinicians, and designed to help health systems coordinate the clinical, financial, and evidence-based decisions for every moment of care. Powered by purpose-built AI for healthcare, Abridge connects patients, providers, payers, and life sciences companies. This year, the platform will support more than 120 million patient-clinician encounters across more than 300 of the largest and most complex health systems in the U.S. With deep workflow integration, the Abridge clinician intelligence platform has been validated to support encounters in 28+ languages across specialties and care settings.

Abridge is setting the industry standard for the responsible deployment of AI across health systems with continual and transparent AI evaluation. The Abridge Assistant references and cites gold-standard sources of evidence. Features like Linked Evidence map AI-generated documentation and responses to source data, helping clinicians quickly trust and verify the output.

Abridge was awarded Best in KLAS for Ambient AI in 2025 and 2026, in addition to other accolades, including TIME Best Inventions of 2024 and 2025, CNBC Disruptor 2025, and Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies 2025.