Mayo Clinic will collaborate with Abridge to expand the use of the technology company's AI-powered clinical conversation platform.
The Rochester, Minn.-based health system will begin rolling out the generative AI tool starting with approximately 2,000 physicians who serve over 1 million patients annually across a range of specialties and care settings.
The enterprise-wide implementation follows a pilot with 400 physicians testing Abridge. That involved a stringent evaluation process, during which Mayo Clinic evaluated Abridge's tool with a rigorous clinical note quality assessment, seeking to ensure that the notes it generated met Mayo's exacting standards while minimizing the need for extensive editing.
"It's so important for us that our documentation is exactly what it needs to be to relay the information to the patients and make sure it's understandable," Amy Williams, MD, executive dean of the Practice at Mayo Clinic, told Becker's.
She underscored the importance of accurate, user-friendly documentation for all patients, particularly those traveling to Mayo Clinic for specialty care who depend on these notes to coordinate with local care teams or manage team-based care for aging family members. The health system cares for patients from every U.S. state and more than 100 countries, further highlighting the importance of understandable, portable documentation in numerous languages.
The pilot evaluated the tool's performance across a wide range of specialties and physician communication styles, a deliberate decision Dr. Williams highlighted as essential. As a nephrologist herself, she noted that a narrow focus on one specialty, such as nephrology, would not yield comprehensive insights.
"If you have nephrologists and GI proceduralists, cardiologists, and surgeons, is the tool going to meet everybody's needs and make it easier to care for those patients so you have more time to really have conversations with the patients and their families?" Dr. Williams asked.
While most Mayo physicians were optimistic at the outset of the pilot, they approached it with a healthy skepticism, questioning whether the tool could consistently produce accurate, meaningful and contextually appropriate notes. Mayo was clear that time savings alone would not suffice; the tool needed to deliver both efficiency and high-quality clinical notes, a benchmark the pilot results successfully met.
"Mayo Clinic's ethos for adopting high-quality innovation complements our drive to continuously enhance our platform to meet the unique needs of clinicians across diverse specialties, languages and care settings," Abridge Founder and CEO Shiv Rao, MD, said. A practicing cardiologist, Dr. Rao regularly uses the Abridge tool in his own clinical practice.
In addition to its work with physicians, Mayo Clinic and Abridge collaborated in July 2024 to develop a generative AI tool tailored for nurses, which will be the first of its kind.
Mayo Clinic joins a growing roster of Abridge's enterprise-wide collaborators, which include Duke Health, Johns Hopkins Medicine, Corewell Health and a recently expanded collaboration with UChicago Medicine.