Dr. Rao co-founded Abridge in 2018, believing that the everyday conversation between clinician and patient is one of healthcare’s most valuable and underused signals. He helped build a company whose generative AI now powers clinical documentation across inpatient and outpatient settings in more than 200 health systems, spanning numerous specialties and languages with precise understanding of therapeutics, pharmaceuticals and diagnostics. A practicing cardiologist at Pittsburgh-based UPMC and former executive at UPMC’s provider-facing venture arm, where he led the provider-facing investment portfolio and helped fund a machine learning in health program at Carnegie Mellon University, Dr. Rao is the rare AI CEO who has spent more time inside a health system than outside it. From the start, he leaned into rigorous health system pilots and the hardest tests of the technology’s capabilities, building toward a larger goal of rewiring the economics of care in a system where administrative costs alone amount to nearly $1 trillion annually. His vision for Abridge extends beyond documentation efficiency to equipping clinicians to be what he describes as near-omniscient and omnipresent detectives, communicators, advocates and healers.
