Medical software developer Abridge Inc. today disclosed that it has raised a $300 million funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

The investment, which also included the participation of Khosla Ventures, values the startup at $5.3 billion. That’s nearly double what it was worth following its previous funding round in February. The milestone follows a quarter in which Abridge’s annualized recurring revenue reportedly reached $117 million.

Medical professionals spend a significant amount of time writing down patient information gleaned during doctor’s visits. Abridge develops an artificial intelligence platform, the Contextual Reasoning Engine, that automates the task. It can record a patient conversation, transcribe it and automatically turn the key details into a medical note.

The company adapts AI-generated notes to user requirements. It says its platform can customize outputted text based on physician preferences or a healthcare system’s internal guidelines. The Contextual Reasoning Engine can optionally enrich the text with data from earlier medical notes.

Abridge also promises to automate several related tasks. One of them is the process of drafting medical orders, documents in which a physician provides instructions on how to carry out a treatment plan. The platform automatically syncs such documents to the EHR, or electronic health record, system in which a hospital keeps clinical information.

To ease data management, healthcare organizations turn information from files such as medical notes into ICD-10 codes. Those are short sequences of numbers and characters that each describe a different medical condition, symptom or related detail. ICD-10 codes’ standardized format simplifies tasks such as data analysis.

Abridge can also generate medical billing codes, which serve a similar function as ICD-10 codes. Both data structures condense clinical information into a concise format optimized for ease of management. The difference is that medical billing codes are primarily used for accounting purposes.

The startup says that it has developed multiple internal workflows designed to avoid AI errors. Before updating its platform, it tests the quality of the new version’s output with a group of medical professionals. It then conducts a larger-scale trial that involves early adopters “trained to be especially vigilant” about the quality of medical notes.

“Every medical conversation is rich with the signals our healthcare system depends on,” said Abridge co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Shiv Rao. “Abridge activates those signals in the background, silently handling the complexity so clinicians can focus on the human moments that matter.”

Abridge will use the funding round announced today to develop more features for its platform. According to the Wall Street Journal, the effort will place particular emphasis on easing the process of generating medical billing codes. 

Image: Abridge