The Department of Veterans Affairs plans to roll out two ambient dictation technologies next month, Abridge and Knowtex AI, Assistant Under Secretary for Health Carolyn Clancy, M.D., said on Monday at the Digital Medicine Society's Healthcare 2030 event.
The VA hosted a tech sprint at its innovation center in Orlando, in which AI scribe companies were invited to demonstrate their technology in the VA environment. Abridge and Knowtex were selected by VA leaders to be deployed in the VA's health system, which serves 9.1 million veterans.
The companies then had to clear additional hurdles to be integrated with the VA.
"Obviously, there's been a lot of sensitive policy issues in terms of informed consent and so on and so forth, in protecting veterans privacy, but people are very, very excited about [this]," Clancy said.
According to a U.S. government contracting notice, the Veterans Health Administration's Digital Health Office signed contracts with Abridge and Knowtex to deliver commercial, cloud-based, ambient scribe tools to transcribe clinical encounters and generate notes.
"The program will integrate with the VA Electronic Health Record and workflows such that providers can initiate encounter recording without manual entry of patient identifying information, and draft notes can be automatically inserted into the electronic health record without copy and paste manual effort," the notice said.
The contract is reportedly worth $5.3 million for Abridge and is part of a VA initiative to improve the efficiency of clinical documentation, according to a government notice dated June 23.
Abridge is one of two companies that won the VA's AI Tech Sprint competition last year. The VA launched the AI Tech Sprint in 2023 with two tracks, one for ambient dictation for clinical encounter notes and one for community care document processing. Knowtex was named a finalist in that program.
In July 2024, the VA announced its intent to award Abridge and Microsoft-owned Nuance sole-source contracts to pilot AI scribe technology. Nuance was not awarded a final contract, instead being replaced by Knowtex.
Generative AI company Abridge, one of Fierce Healthcare's Fierce 15 of 2024 honorees, uses artificial intelligence to increase the speed and accuracy of medical note-taking, leveraging a proprietary data set derived from more than 1.5 million medical encounters. The company's AI converts a patient-clinician conversation into a structured clinical note draft in real time and integrates it seamlessly into the EHR system.
In June, Abridge raised $300 million in series E funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz and joined by Khosla Ventures. The latest funding, just four months after its $250 million series D round, boosted the company's valuation to a reported $5.3 billion.
The company has raised approximately $800 million to date, including a $150 million series C funding round in February 2024.
Abridge's technology has now been deployed in more than 150 health systems, a 50% increase from just four months ago, the company said in June. The company says it will support more than 50 million medical conversations this year.