{"id":6833,"date":"2026-06-11T19:15:34","date_gmt":"2026-06-11T19:15:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/?p=6833"},"modified":"2026-06-11T19:15:34","modified_gmt":"2026-06-11T19:15:34","slug":"abridge-wants-to-be-the-operating-system-for-medicine-and-nvidia-and-eli-lilly-are-helping-build-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/?p=6833","title":{"rendered":"Abridge wants to be the operating system for medicine\u2014and NVIDIA and Eli Lilly are helping build it"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

On Thursday morning in New York City, Dr. Shiv Rao stood before a room of health system executives and made a case that ambient AI\u2014a technology that began largely as a transcription tool\u2014was ready to do something far more consequential than writing a doctor\u2019s notes.<\/p>\n

\n

Abridge, the startup Rao cofounded in 2018, announced a strategic investment from drugmaker Eli Lilly and what it is calling the first AI-native clinician intelligence platform: a system that both documents the patient-clinician conversation and uses it as the foundation for billing, clinical decision support, payer adjudication, and pharmaceutical trial screening. More than 300 health systems\u2014including Northwestern Medicine, Emory Healthcare, and Johns Hopkins\u2014are already live on the platform, supporting upward of 100 million clinical conversations annually and serving more than 250 million patients.<\/p>\n

The company\u2019s platform captures conversation between patients and doctors in real time and automatically generates the clinical note, billing codes, and patient summary before the doctor has left the hallway. What\u2019s new is everything that flows from that moment.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Before the visit, Abridge surfaces care gaps and prior clinical context for the clinician. During the encounter, the tech suggests discussion topics and surfaces relevant clinical guidelines without requiring the physician to switch applications. After the visit, it generates the documentation, flowsheets, and orders\u2014all grounded in the actual words spoken.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve known all along we wanted to be able to connect the dots across the main stakeholders in healthcare, because the only thing that matters, I think, in terms of AI\u2019s impact on healthcare is business model innovation.\u201d Rao told Fortune. \u201cIf we can\u2019t actually improve how healthcare is delivered, how it\u2019s experienced, and how it\u2019s paid for, then we haven\u2019t really moved the needle on the problem.\u201d<\/p>\n

Behind the platform expansion is a war chest and a set of strategic bets. Abridge has raised approximately $1.1 billion to date, most recently closing a $316 million Series E extension in April 2026 at a $5.3 billion valuation. NVentures, NVIDIA\u2019s venture arm, is among its backers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

On Thursday, NVIDIA announced it\u2019s also co-developing with Abridge the first foundation model for clinical conversations: an AI model trained on the specific dynamics of doctor-patient dialogue, not a general large language model adapted for medicine.<\/p>\n

Rao also announced a partnership with Artisight\u2014an NVIDIA-backed smart hospital company that uses computer vision to automate patient monitoring and nursing workflows inside hospital rooms. Together, the two platforms give care teams a continuous feed of room sensor data and ambient documentation across an entire hospital stay.<\/p>\n

Eli Lilly\u2019s bet tracks closely with its own AI ambitions. The pharma giant is simultaneously building what it has called the industry\u2019s most powerful AI supercomputer in partnership with NVIDIA, and Abridge\u2019s new life sciences module\u2014which can surface clinical trial eligibility from within the clinical conversation itself\u2014represents the kind of patient-facing pipeline Lilly needs to accelerate enrollment for next-generation therapies.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor us, the most important first priority that we would love to explore, that we are working to explore with them, is around clinical trials,\u201d Rao said.<\/p>\n

The ambient clinical intelligence mark Abridge is chasing was valued at $7.24 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $56.61 billion by 2035. Microsoft, which acquired speech-recognition company Nuance for $19.7 billion in 2022, is the dominant enterprise incumbent. Ambience Healthcare, Suki, and Nabla are all also well-capitalized challengers. But the field is expected to consolidate within the next 12 to 18 months. The question is whether Abridge\u2019s expansion into payments and life sciences creates a defensible moat, or simply a larger target.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow the priority is how much impact can we create, and speed is everything, so I think for the foreseeable future we\u2019re just going to focus on the algorithm,\u201d Rao told Fortune<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The platform\u2019s ambition is also its risk surface. Recording protected health conversations requires updated security assessments, state-specific patient consent, and business associate agreements governing how audio is stored. And AI-generated notes that slip past physician review become part of the permanent medical record\u2014a liability that compounds as the platform moves from documentation into billing codes and clinical orders.<\/p>\n

Beneath it all is a deeper governance question. Abridge is now positioning itself as neutral infrastructure connecting providers, payers, and life sciences companies through some of the most sensitive data in medicine: the conversation between a sick person and their doctor.<\/p>\n

Whether that trust holds, at scale, is an untested hypothesis.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

#Abridge #operating #system #medicineand #NVIDIA #Eli #Lilly #helping #build<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Thursday morning in New York City, Dr. Shiv Rao stood before a room of health system executives and made a case that ambient AI\u2014a technology that began largely as… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6834,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[9234,82,9231,6848,9232,5429,1071,1469,6164,2943,6849,9233,9235,330,7543,6491,950,568],"class_list":["post-6833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-abridge","tag-build","tag-clinical-trials","tag-eli","tag-eli-lilly","tag-gpu","tag-health","tag-helping","tag-hospitals","tag-insurance","tag-lilly","tag-medical-technology","tag-medicineand","tag-nvidia","tag-operating","tag-pharmaceutical-industry","tag-system","tag-venture-capital"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6833\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}