OpenNotes, an international leader in health transparency research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), and Abridge, a leading generative AI platform for clinical documentation, launched a partnership that will bring patient-clinician conversations to the forefront of research to enhance patient notes. This partnership is part of BIDMC’s new OpenNotes Lab, an initiative fostering collaboration between patients and clinicians in developing AI-powered tools designed to advance transparency and digital health equity.
OpenNotes is leading a study to evaluate Abridge’s AI-generated patient visit summaries. The insights will be used to enhance these notes to better meet patients’ needs. In the initial phase, focus groups of patients who have been given Abridge visit summaries will evaluate them for usefulness, accessibility, and other measures of effectiveness. For this phase, there will be no use of patient data. OpenNotes specializes in co-designing research and outcomes that center on patients and doctors to improve the healthcare experience.
“We are excited to lead this project that brings patients’ voices directly into the design of health AI tools,” said Catherine M. DesRoches, DrPH, Executive Director of OpenNotes at BIDMC, and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. “By centering patients and their care partners in the process, we aim to establish new standards for responsible and transparent use of AI in clinical documentation, and ensuring these technologies serve clinicians, patients, and their care partners.”
Abridge automates clinical documentation in real-time using AI, thereby reducing the burden and distraction of repetitive administrative tasks for clinicians. After each visit, Abridge creates a structured clinical note as well as a visit summary for the patient, which is written at an accessible 8th-grade reading level and provides information like new diagnoses, medications, and next steps. The collaboration with OpenNotes is aimed at enhancing the Abridge patient visit summary and setting a new standard in patient-facing documentation.
"This research collaboration with OpenNotes will harness the power of actual patient conversations in informing the next generation of visit summaries, an invaluable tool in keeping doctors and patients on the same page," said Dr. Shiv Rao, CEO and Founder of Abridge. “We are excited to continue exploring ways to enrich the Abridge platform with insights from the research we will conduct with OpenNotes.”
"The visit summary came about with the widespread adoption of electronic health records in the early 2000s, and it's overdue for a refresh," said Katie McCurdy, Founder of Pictal Health, patient advocate, and user experience designer. McCurdy also serves on the OpenNotes Lab Advisory Board. "The potential impact of clearer, more user-friendly visit summaries is huge. OpenNotes and Abridge are the ideal teams to tackle this challenge, and patient advocates will be paying close attention."
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About OpenNotes
OpenNotes is an international movement spreading, studying, and teaching transparent communication among patients, families, and clinicians. When clinical notes are shared with patients, they are called ‘open notes.’ OpenNotes is motivated by evidence indicating that when health professionals offer patients and families ready access to clinical notes, the quality and safety of care improves. OpenNotes is a not-for-profit research lab based at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a major Harvard Medical School teaching hospital. For more information: opennotes.org
About Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is a leading academic medical center, where extraordinary care is supported by high-quality education and research. BIDMC is a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School and consistently ranks as a national leader among independent hospitals in National Institutes of Health funding. BIDMC is the official hospital of the Boston Red Sox.
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is a part of Beth Israel Lahey Health, a health care system that brings together academic medical centers and teaching hospitals, community and specialty hospitals, more than 4,700 physicians and 39,000 employees in a shared mission to expand access to great care and advance the science and practice of medicine through groundbreaking research and education. For more information: bidmc.org
About Abridge
Abridge was founded in 2018 to power 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.
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