Dear Colleagues,
We are thrilled to announce that early in 2025, UNC Health will roll out the Abridge ambient AI documentation platform to UNC Health physicians and APPs as a key part of the Forward Together 2030 initiative. Abridge is embedded into Epic@UNC, and it transforms patient-clinician conversations into structured clinical notes, providing virtual AI-driven scribing.
One clear goal of Forward Together 2030 is to reduce burden of delivering care and improve the satisfaction for our clinicians while maintaining UNC Health’s high quality of patient-centered care. We conducted a thorough year-long pilot evaluation of multiple industry-leading Epic-integrated ambient documentation platforms. The pilot involved approximately 100 primary care and specialty physicians and APPs from various UNC Health owned and managed entities. The results have been remarkable — 81 percent of pilot users reported a moderate or large decrease in workload, and 80 percent who also use in-person scribes preferred using the Abridge solution.
As one pilot user noted, “It’s been a game changer. I can complete my work while I’m at work and not have to work from home. I’m in heaven. Now I don’t have a laptop between me and my patient anymore. I feel more connected.”
Our goal is to roll this out quickly to our teams with implementation starting in early February. In the coming weeks, you or your local leaders will receive a survey to gauge your interest in using the Abridge ambient scribe platform. Your responses will identify clinicians interested in this innovative tool, gather essential user information, and guide the phased roll-out of the platform across both owned and managed entities in the months ahead. Please respond promptly and spread the word to your interested colleagues! Our contract with Abridge will provide a pathway for all of our physicians and APPs to participate.
While the platform is currently optimized for use in ambulatory settings, we are actively collaborating with Abridge to explore early access to functionality for Emergency Department and inpatient settings for our clinicians.
Under the leadership of Dr. Susan Moore, President of UNC Rex Physicians and owner of the FT2030 Medical Group Optimization workstream, this effort has been a true team endeavor. We would like to extend special thanks to Dr. Sachin Gupta, Chief Medical Officer for the UNC Physicians Network, and Dr. David McSwain, UNC Health Chief Medical Informatics Officer, for their outstanding leadership through the FT2030 Ease of Practice work group. Special thanks also to Vineeta Khemani, ISD Executive Director for Enterprise Architecture and Clinical Systems, and the entire ISD team for their outstanding contributions to implementation, project management, evaluation, contracting and vendor relationships.
We also would like to thank all our physicians and APPs who were part of our AI scribing pilots. Your efforts were instrumental in bringing this transformative Forward Together 2030 initiative to life.
We are confident Abridge will greatly enhance our ability to deliver exceptional care while reducing workload and improving satisfaction for clinicians across UNC Health. Working together as One Great Team, we are making UNC Health a better place to both receive and deliver healthcare.
Thank you for all that you do for our patients and our communities,
Matt & Brent
Matt Ewend, MD
Chief Clinician Officer, UNC Health
President, UNC Physicians
Brent Lamm
Chief Information Officer, UNC Health