Ruth’s reporter’s notebook: Abridge is moving beyond scribing with several big announcements this week. The announcements—collaborations with Eli Lily, NVIDIA, and Northwestern University—point to how the company plans to be an AI company of the future. 

Last summer, Epic announced it was launching its own ambient scribe and ending partnerships with Abridge and other outside scribes. At the time, there was a lot of media swirl around what this would do to Abridge’s business, since more than 40% of hospitals are wedded to Epic, its integrations, and often its products. 

But Abridge CEO Shiv Rao seems to have a plan. The keystone of it is a partnership with chipmaker Nvidia to build healthcare-focused artificial intelligence. As you’ll see in our conversation below, one of the major reasons for the partnership is so that Abridge can own more of its stack and be less dependent on other companies for success. 

Things to consider: Two health executives told me that Abridge is moving faster than Epic, and it’s obvious the company is hungry and willing to work with them to develop interesting new tools. For example, one said that Abridge was willing to develop scribing for nurses, which has been hard to get elsewhere on the market. And Abridge, for all its hunger, is willing to pay attention to health systems that don’t feel prioritized by Epic, according to Craig Norquist, CMIO at HonorHealth, a medium-sized health system in Arizona.

However, they’re still watching Epic to see what it delivers and are willing to shift products if and when Epic brings forward its own ambient scribe. And one said, they’re cognizant of the fact that all of the intelligence that Abridge is delivering won’t be deeply integrated with Epic. That will be a hurdle for its adoption. 

Also worth noting: A big study just came out in Nature to evaluate two clinical AI tools, Open Evidence and UptoDate Expert AI, against the frontier models. The findings? General-purpose large language models from companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google perform better based on medical benchmarks. 

Expansion: Still, Abridge is moving beyond hospitals. It is now working with payers Cigna and Aetna on value-based care arrangements and real-time payments for providers, respectively. The company also inked a deal with pharmaceutical company Eli Lily, in which Lily has taken a stake in Abridge.  

Bottomline: Abridge faces headwinds, but the company is staying nimble. 

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has created a new office for health technology that will focus on driving interoperability—typically a task for the Office of the National Coordinator. Last year, when President Trump took office, there was a lot of discussion about whether CMS, which could use reimbursement as a carrot for stoking interoperability, would absorb ONC. Instead, this new office seems to be how CMS will lead on interoperability. As former head of ONC, Jodi Daniel points out, with 8 divisions and 100 responsibilities, this office “shows a significant shift in expectations and responsibilities!”

The House Appropriations Committee voted unanimously to strike down the controversial WISeR pilot, which added AI-backed prior authorization for Medicare services. “The committee believes that any proposal to impose prior authorization requirements in traditional Medicare should be subject to robust congressional oversight and transparent evaluation of impacts on beneficiary access to care, provider burden, and program costs,” read the amendment voted by the committee.

More than a quarter of large employers say they are adding criteria this year or next for weight loss drug coverage, while 11% have dropped or are planning to drop coverage for weight-loss purposes altogether, according to soon-to-be released data from benefits-advisory firm Mercer. Currently, around 45% of plans don’t offer coverage for GLP-1.

Wearables are ubiquitous, and they are generating a wealth of data that, until recently, had no clear medical application. That’s about to change: Oura and Whoop recently announced it would make it possible for users to contact doctors directly from their apps, sharing the metrics they had collected. Mario Aguilar at STAT breaks down the challenges and opportunities behind this trove of data entering the doctor’s office (or, rather, the doctor entering the trove of data).