Keynote: Beyond Clinical Notes: Abridge's Vertical AI Playbook | Day 1
Keynote: Beyond Clinical Notes: Abridge's Vertical AI Playbook Speaker: Shiv Rao, Co-founder & CEO at Abridge Recorded at Fellows Forum 2026 (September 23 to 24, 2026).
Co-founder & CEO, Abridge
Search every verified Shivdev Rao interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Shivdev Rao, co-founder and CEO of Abridge, discussed the company's expansion from ambient documentation into a broader AI platform for clinical, operational, and financial workflows during a keynote at Fellows Forum 2026. He stated that Abridge is deployed across more than 300 health systems and described the company's focus on mid-training and post-training models for specific tasks, as well as partnerships with labs and Nvidia. Rao also mentioned pursuing use cases such as prior authorization, risk adjustment for Medicare Advantage, and real-time payments, which he called the "holy grail" for reducing waste in healthcare revenue cycle. In interviews, Rao emphasized the gap between basic AI demonstrations and enterprise-grade products, arguing that evaluations are central to building scalable solutions. He recounted that Abridge faced a "do or die" moment in 2022–2023 before large language models made the product more effective. Rao also spoke about his personal motivations, describing a service-oriented mindset and a desire to leave things better than they were, while noting that he does not frame his work in explicitly religious terms.
Keynote: Beyond Clinical Notes: Abridge's Vertical AI Playbook Speaker: Shiv Rao, Co-founder & CEO at Abridge Recorded at Fellows Forum 2026 (September 23 to 24, 2026).
Doctors now need an estimated 30 hours a day to complete every clerical task asked of them. They are compensated not for the care they deliver but for the care they document. That gap is where physician burnout lives, and where AI has the most to offer. Dr. Shiv Rao, Co-Founder and CEO of Abridge, joins host John Driscoll to discuss how an ambient AI platform now deployed across more than 300 health systems is giving clinicians back the time and presence to actually practice medicine, and why the next frontier for this technology goes beyond documentation into real-time clinical decision supp…
Ever wondered about the human side of top-performing Unicorn CEO’s? What do these leaders think, believe, do, focus on, and how do they handle the really big challenges? Dr. Shiv Rao is a practicing cardiologist and the Founder and CEO of @Abridge-Studios , a leading platform in AI in healthcare innovation. Valued at over $5 billion, Abridge sits at the intersection of AI and medicine, supporting millions of doctor-patient conversations each year across 300 of the largest health systems in the US. Shiv has been named to TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI and Modern Healthcare's 100 Mo…
"We think healthcare is the biggest opportunity for AI." Doctors are burned out. Patients don’t understand the advice they’re given. And the U.S. healthcare system is drowning each year in $1.5 trillion – with a “T” – in administrative costs. CEO Shiv Rao, a practicing cardiologist who co-founded Abridge in Pittsburgh in 2018, thinks he can help. His startup is building the “AI operating system” for healthcare, with software that automates the clerical work of a visit, from notes to billing, and increasingly assists with making clinical recommendations, too. Valued at $5.3B, Abridge serv…
What did Abridge get right about their timing, distribution, and culture that catapulted them to be one of today's leading AI companies? Now valued at $5.3B and backed by A16z, Khosla Ventures, Scribble Ventures, and others, CEO Shiv Rao, M.D. says they were "eating glass" in the early days. Building AI products has never been easier, but building high-growth companies - even in the AI boom - is as hard as it ever was. Listen in on Shiv's conversation with Elizabeth Weil (GP, Scribble Ventures) to break down the biggest drivers of Abridge's growth engine. They discuss: The Biggest Unlock:…
Dr. Shiv Rao is the CEO and Co-Founder of Abridge, a leader in generative AI for healthcare. The company reached a $5.3 billion valuation following a $300 million funding round with investors including Jensen Huang, Henry Kravis, USV, Bessemer Venture Partners and Elad Gill. A practicing cardiologist, Shiv has scaled the company to 450 employees and partnered with major health systems like Emory and Yale. ----------------------------------------------- Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 01:32 Five Years in the Wilderness: Lessons on Market Timing 10:54 Healthcare Adoption of AI Is Now Table Stakes 11:…
In this episode, Dr. Nisha Mehta is joined by Dr. Shiv Rao, MD, CEO and Co-Founder of Abridge. They discuss: Shiv’s journey from clinician to investor to builder, and how being a clinician gives you something that no pure technologist has - the ability to feel the problem firsthand How the barrier to entry to build something has never been lower, but the barrier to doing it right in healthcare has never been higher The importance of holding onto your north star tightly, even if the world isn’t ready for it, and surviving long enough for the market to catch up How this technology is about more…
A couple weeks ago, Michał Nedoszytko placed third globally at Anthropic's hackathon out of 13,000 participants. He was the head of cardiology at a hospital in Brussels at the time. Now he is Clinical Scientist at Abridge. On this episode of Vital Signs, Nikhil and I sat down with Abridge's CEO Shiv Rao and Michał to chat about how the hire came together, what changed with Opus 4.6 that let a cardiologist ship a working MVP in 40 minutes, and where they both think clinical AI goes next. 0:00 Intro 0:19 Hackathon Fame 3:52 Shiv Recruits Mahal 6:30 Doctors Who Code 9:07 Prototypes vs Producti…
Shiv Rao, CEO and Co-Founder of Abridge, walks through how the company is expanding beyond AI scribing following new partnerships with JAMA and NEJM. He frames the expansion around a pre-visit, during-visit, and post-visit product framework, using the context captured across the full clinical encounter to surface relevant evidence and close workflow gaps at the right moment. The conversation covers how Abridge thinks about clinical intelligence as a reframe of clinical decision support. The old category was defined by rule-based alerts and popup fatigue. The new approach is contextual, surfac…
In this episode of Digital Health Interviews, we sit down with Shiv Rao, CEO and co-founder of Abridge, to talk about the real future of ambient AI in healthcare. Shiv shares his journey from cardiologist and health system innovator to building one of the most talked-about companies in clinical AI. We discuss what actually differentiates Abridge in a crowded AI scribe market, how the company thinks about model orchestration and in-house AI, what trust and safety should look like in healthcare AI, and why the bigger opportunity goes far beyond note-taking. We also get into some of the harder…
This week, JCal sat down with Shiv Rao at LAUNCH Fest 2026. Shiv is a cardiologist, CEO, and co-founder of Abridge, a $5B+ company that's raised close to $1B to build vertical large language models for healthcare. Shiv breaks down why the US healthcare system is broken, how AI is already outperforming doctors on average, and what it took to build a unicorn in one of the most regulated industries on the planet. We explore how AI is transforming doctor-patient conversations, eliminating clinician burnout, and reshaping how care is delivered and paid for. Doctors Need 30 Hours a Day: An America…
Clinical Documentation: Abridge • Shiv Rao AI is entering the exam room—not to diagnose, but to listen. In this episode, we explore how ambient AI is transforming clinical documentation, freeing doctors from keyboards and returning their focus to patients. Shiv Rao, CEO of Abridge, joins us to unpack what it means when machines start listening in, and what that could mean for the future of healthcare, trust, and the doctor-patient relationship.
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