What You Should Know:
– Abridge, a company specializing in AI-powered clinical documentation, announced the launch of a new pediatric well visit note type within its platform.
– The enhancement leverages Abridge’s advanced Contextual Reasoning Engine to automatically generate clinically useful and billable documentation tailored to the unique, structured needs of pediatric well visits, which vary significantly by a child’s age and developmental stage.
– The new feature was developed in collaboration with pediatricians at partner health systems and with significant input from Abridge’s on-staff pediatric specialists, Dr. Hilary Stempel and Dr. Mondira Ray.
Tailoring AI for the Nuances of Pediatric Well Visits
Pediatric well visits, which constitute about one-third of pediatric primary care encounters in the U.S., are fundamental to establishing strong provider-patient-caregiver relationships. Unlike other encounter types, their documentation is highly structured and must adapt to the specific age and developmental phase of the child—for instance, a 6-month checkup protocol differs vastly from that of a 15-year-old’s annual physical.
Abridge’s new pediatric note type is specifically designed to meet these needs. The templated History of Present Illness is structured around key subsections, and the system automatically lists “Well Visit” and “Anticipatory Guidance” as primary problems in the Assessment and Plan section of the note.
Enhancing Clinician-Patient Relationships and Reducing Burnout
Pediatrics has often been an overlooked area in health technology, with pediatricians frequently asked to adapt tools built for adult care. This, coupled with the unique complexities of their work, contributes to high levels of burnout among pediatric primary care clinicians. The documentation burden can significantly affect their ability to be fully present with patients and families.
“Pediatrics is all about relationships,” said Dr. Hilary Stempel, a pediatrician and Clinical Success Director at Abridge. “In each visit, you’re setting up your relationships over longitudinal periods of a patient’s life and childhood. Abridge enables you to move seamlessly from topic to topic and to know that your output is going to be structured”. She later added, “The feeling you get using Abridge as a clinician is a true sense of ease, because you’re able to be present with the kids and families. You can talk without being distracted by documentation, and all the advice and guidance you are giving caregivers is being captured. You are giving the best-possible care because you are fully present”.
Dr. Mondira Ray, a pediatrician and a Clinician Scientist at Abridge who uses the technology in her own practice, stated, “We built this technology not just with AI, but with deep clinical context. I use it when I see my own patients in clinic, which has given me a unique perspective to also ensure it continues to meet the needs of our practice”.
How Abridge’s AI “Magically” Crafts Pediatric Notes
The “magic” behind this tailored documentation is Abridge’s Contextual Reasoning Engine, a new AI architecture that connects the clinical conversation with a wide array of contextual information from disparate sources, including prior notes, the clinician’s specialty, and the patient’s age.
“Abridge can infer directly from the electronic health record: What is the clinician’s specialty? What is the patient’s age?” explained Dr. Katherine Choi, one of the Abridge product managers who helped design the well visit note type along with Dr. Mike Myerburg, a Clinician Scientist at Abridge. “Then the AI platform captures the conversation itself, combining that with the context to determine the necessary note type, automatically and in real time”.
For example, for a 9-month-old infant, Abridge structures the information captured from the conversation into sections like Diet, Elimination, Sleep, Oral health, Development, and Social/home, depending on the content of the visit. Other subsections such as “school,” “activities,” or “puberty” may be included for older children based on their developmental stage and the conversation’s specifics.
Dr. Joel Davidson, a pediatrician at Akron Children’s, shared his initial reaction: “How did I feel the first time that I used the well visit template? ‘There it is! That’s what we were looking for!’ Now I can read what I want to in the space that I need to”.
Strong Early Adoption and Positive Feedback
The new pediatric well visit note type has received positive feedback from hundreds of clinicians across 24 health system partners, achieving an average rating of 4.5 stars across hundreds of thousands of notes generated. Clinicians have praised its ease of use, detail, and ability to capture the unique essence of each patient encounter, with one user commenting, “The note included anticipatory guidance in a way that was so unique to the patient and visit, I now know I have documented a truly unique patient story”.
