Abridge launched into the healthcare market eight years ago as an artificial intelligence scribe, but the company has been steadily building out its tech to function more like an AI assistant across clinical workflows.
The company is scaling up its clinical decision support solution through a partnership with Wolters Kluwer's UpToDate, a clinical evidence solution that's been on the market for 30 years. Abridge has been working with Wolters Kluwer to integrate context-aware clinical decision support within the ambient documentation workflow to make it easier for clinicians to access evidence-based answers at the point of conversation. With this feature, clinicians can get relevant clinical and treatment insights in the moment without a separate search or extra clicks, executives said.
Abridge made that feature generally available to all its customers at the end of March, Matt Troup, physician assistant certified (PA-C), clinical strategy principal at Abridge, told Fierce Healthcare in an interview earlier this month.
The partnership combines real-time clinical evidence and guidance from UpToDate with patient context from AI-powered clinical notes within Abridge, Troup noted.
"In the same workflow where the note gets generated, there's now this Abridge AI interface and that interface allows a clinician to directly ask questions about that patient, whether it's, 'Do I need to titrate this medication? What other treatment options exist? What's the right antibiotic given a conversation I just had?" We then leverage the content from UpToDate with our models to deliver a response to that clinician in the workflow. And, since we have access to the transcripts and the notes that we just generated, we actually use that as context, so you have context-aware education shaped by the patient in front of the clinician right in the workflow," Troup said.
On Wednesday, Abridge unveiled new partnerships with the NEJM Group and the American Medical Association to expand content integrations within its clinical decision support solution, called Abridge AI. Those integrations will become generally available in the coming months, the company said.
Under agreements with the NEJM Group, publisher of the New England Journal of Medicine, and the AMA, publisher of the JAMA and the journals in the JAMA Network family of publications, content from these publications will inform Abridge's clinical decision support system. The JAMA Network includes 11 specialty journals and JAMA Network Open.
The multi-year content partnership agreements will enable clinicians using Abridge to leverage peer-reviewed research before, during and after patient conversations within existing workflows and contextualized to patients as part of its growing decision support capabilities, Abridge executives said.
"Clinicians are managing more complexity than ever. These content partnerships will make trusted clinical evidence available without breaking their focus on the patient,” Shiv Rao, M.D., CEO and co-founder of Abridge and a practicing cardiologist, said in a statement. “There is no higher scientific standard in medicine than the research published in the New England Journal of Medicine and in JAMA, and we are committed to ensuring that standard is integrated into the clinical encounter as contextual insight grounded in the patient conversation."
Abridge says its technology now supports the entire clinical encounter—helping clinicians prepare before the visit, capture the patient conversation, generate structured documentation and surface evidence-based and cited insights to clinical questions, all within a single workflow.
Abridge now works with 250 health systems. The company said it is marching toward supporting 100 million patient-clinician conversations in 2026.
The NEJM Group and the JAMA Network have also inked multi-year content agreements with OpenEvidence, the AI-powered medical search engine. Both OpenEvidence and Abridge have seen rapid growth in their respective markets and are making contrasting moves to become AI copilots for clinicians.
Abridge has set its sights on expanding its AI capabilities beyond clinical documentation to tackle other admin tasks like prior auth. A year ago, the company unveiled what it dubbed a "contextual reasoning engine" that produces billable notes that support appropriate claims at the point of care.
The company is also working with Highmark Health to co-design an AI-powered prior authorization solution at the point of care. At the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in January, Abridge announced it was partnering with real-time health information network Availity to fire up AI-powered prior authorization.
A deep dive into the Abridge-UpToDate integration
Both Wolters Kluwer and Abridge have scaled their businesses working with large healthcare systems, hospitals and academic institutions, embedding their enterprise-grade capabilities into provider workflows.
UpToDate, a widely used clinical decision support resource, provides access to more than 13,000 clinical topics across 25 specialties. UpToDate has more than 3 million clinician users working at thousands of hospitals.
The two companies have a large overlap of customers, Julie Frey, vice president of clinical decision support at Wolters Kluwer Health, told Fierce Healthcare during a joint interview with Abridge's Troup.
"This capability is something that's really come through loudly from joint customers' requests. There's just a natural synergy given that I also think we both are very enterprise-grade focused in the way we think about governance, the way we think about the health system as a full organization, and then how to enable all the use cases across the organization," Frey said.
During the HIMSS 2026 conference in March, Greg Samios, CEO of Wolters Kluwer Health, described the Abridge-UpToDate partnership as representing the "Holy Grail" that healthcare organizations have long pursued. "It's matching up that best evidence with that patient-specific context in the workflow for clinicians," he told Fierce Healthcare.
The clinical decision support capabilities embedded in Abridge can help reduce cognitive load for clinicians and improve the effectiveness of decision making, Frey said. But the benefits go beyond efficiency and productivity, she added.
"What we're also starting to hear is that it's giving clinicians more confidence," she said.
Abridge says it rigorously evaluates its AI-powered CDS capabilities for enterprise readiness. The company's science team conducts comprehensive offline evaluations of its CDS responses to assess accuracy and safety, executives said. Throughout the pre-release process for Abridge’s CDS capabilities, the company's clinical team conducted hundreds of queries across a wide range of medical specialties, designed to test the system and identify failure modes that only real-world complexity can surface.
Having trusted clinical evidence at the point of care is critical, Troup noted. A widely cited stat is that medical knowledge doubles every 73 days. Partnering with an organization like UpToDate that can "pull from the latest and greatest guidelines of evidence-based guidance is critical," Troup said.
"I've been a clinician now for almost 17 years. I feel like I grew up on UpToDate. There was no question that if we were going to build this tool to be as impactful as possible, it made complete sense to use the content from UpToDate as the database to draw from," he said. "The type of partner we have in this is important because for this to be a trusted part of the workflow and knowing that the pace of innovation is so fast for governance committees now and health systems that what they really need to do their best work and anchor on clinical safety is to look to trusted partners."
During beta testing with early adopter health systems, Abridge heard feedback from clinicians that the context-aware clinical decision support has "changed the game," Troup said.
"Clinicians are telling us that the experience of having information shaped by this patient conversation and this clinical scenario directly in my workflow has changed how I practice. We had one clinician who said, 'It's really created a lovely workflow that supports me in giving the care I need to give.' That's the critical piece of this: when information is required and time is of the essence, we want to build a workflow that creates as limited friction as possible," he said.
As Abridge builds out its decision support solution, there are opportunities to evaluate how access to clinical evidence drives better outcomes and overall quality of care, Troup said.
"We are tracking right now, certainly utilization, the number of queries, generally, just better understanding what types of questions clinicians are asking. I think this is part of our roadmap of data collection with UpToDate is to better understand how this is really changing the way clinicians practice. What does it mean to have access to evidence-based guidance that's shaped by the patient that's sitting directly in front of you, and have that be accessible to make the best decision possible," he noted.
"Over time, there might be a real opportunity for kind of harder ROI, what metrics the health systems care about that we can directly tie to this integration," Frey added.
Wolters Kluwer, for its own part, is investing deeply in AI to supercharge its clinical decision support tools. In October, it launched UpToDate Expert AI as a generative-AI-powered version of the widely used CDS solution. The company described it as the next evolution of UpToDate, meeting clinicians' need for the speed and power of gen AI with reliable medical knowledge.
As healthcare AI evolves, startups and companies that initially focused on different use cases are blurring the lines, moving toward being comprehensive AI copilots. Partnerships between different health tech players also are advancing AI capabilities across clinical workflows.
"Ultimately, what you want is to be able to enable the decision or an action for the clinician. What we're seeing is kind of an evolution in product categories, and we used to think of things as kind of in silos, and I think part of that is just the maturity of the different technologies and budgets. If you go back to the mission, and you go back to the fundamentals of what our organizations are trying to do, you're trying to help the clinician in making a decision or driving an action. The more that we can reduce that siloed product categories to enable that, the more we're winning, and we're actually aligned, I think, with the ultimate mission of these businesses," Frey said.
Teams at Abridge are also thinking about how the integration of clinical evidence can evolve to prompt an active discussion with the clinician rather than just responding to a question.
"Maybe there's an evidence-based pathway that hasn't been considered yet. Maybe there's a quality gap that they can close based on what we know about the conversation and what we can pull from UpToDate. That starts to set the stage for how to just empower and superpower clinicians, make them the hero of their story," Troup said, noting that decision support tools could shift from being in the background to being a copilot controlled by clinicians.