How Abridge assistant is Reshaping Clinical Practice: Dr. Kristin Jacob of Corewell Health

Primary care requires clinicians to have an enormous range of knowledge. A single day's schedule might run from seeing a newborn for their first checkup to managing a chronic condition for a geriatric patient, and each carries its own set of guidelines, screening intervals, and medication considerations. Much of the work of preparing for that day happens outside of the exam room.

Abridge Assistant brings contextual clinical reasoning to the point of care. Built by clinicians and machine learning scientists working side by side, it's trained to weigh what matters the way a clinician would: the allergy that rules out a drug, the family history that moves a screening up, the guideline exception this patient meets. It draws on the conversation, the chart, and trusted medical literature to deliver evidence-based responses without pulling you out of your workflow. Now live across more than 300 health systems, and getting sharper with every capability clinicians ask for.

We recently sat down with Dr. Kristin Jacob, an internal medicine-pediatrics clinician and Medical Director of Physician and APP Well-Being at Corewell Health. As a practicing primary care clinician, she's using Abridge Assistant's context-aware decision support across her own workflow. As a well-being leader, she's also thinking about how to bring it to the colleagues who stand to benefit most. In our conversation, she shared how Abridge Assistant has transformed her practice before, during, and after visits, and where she sees Abridge having the greatest impact.

In Conversation with Dr. Kristin Jacob

Tell us about your practice. What does a typical day look like?

I practice outpatient internal medicine and pediatrics, and my days vary quite a bit. A lot of wellness visits, a lot of follow-up, a mix of virtual and in-person throughout the day, acute visits coming in, and add-ons always. And, like many of us in the ambulatory setting, I'm interacting with the in-basket and the asynchronous care we provide all the time. I love primary care, and I love seeing how we can make our work even more efficient and joyful with technologies like Abridge.

Why is Abridge Assistant with context-aware decision support valuable in a specialty like pediatrics?

In primary care, the questions come at you from every direction, and you cannot hold all of it in your head at once. Abridge decision support has moved the learning to the front of the visit instead of the end of it. The questions I used to research afterward, or call a patient back about, I can now answer before I walk into the room, or while I'm still sitting with the patient. That means I can educate them on the spot. It has lightened my cognitive load considerably, too.

When do you find yourself reaching for Abridge Assistant most?

Pre-charting. I'm an avid pre-charter and have been for my whole 10-year career in primary care. I like to walk in already knowing what has happened with the patient, so I can make the most of a visit that is always too brief. But prepping takes a significant amount of time. Mondays are my long day, often about 12 hours of patient visits, and it would take me an hour and a half to two hours on a Sunday to prepare those charts.

Now, with Abridge, I can pull a summary organized by problem instead of reconstructing it myself. Before I walk in, I already know where their heart failure stands, that they’ve seen cardiology since our last visit, how their chronic back pain is doing, and where their diabetes is. For an annual wellness visit with a complicated patient, having all of that ahead of time has been incredibly helpful. It also aligns with the problem-oriented charting I stick to in my visits.

Walk us through a recent example of how you used Abridge Assistant with a patient.

I was recently preparing for a preoperative consultation with a pretty complex patient, and I was able to review their medication list and ask Abridge about it before I walked in the door. I was so impressed that without having seen the patient, it knew what kind of surgery was coming up and laid out the risk assessment for me: Intermediate risk of bleeding, patient on Eliquis, recent creatinine here, stop it 48 hours before the procedure. Anticoagulants were always something I'd have to look up, and I usually did that after the visit. Having it in front of me beforehand meant I could educate the patient in the room.

I use Abridge decision support during the visit, too. I recently had a patient who was starting a new medication, and I knew she had a history of a prolonged QTc, but I couldn't remember the details [a prolonged QTc is a finding on an EKG that means the heart is taking longer than it should to reset between beats, which means higher risk for arrhythmia]. I asked Abridge to search her chart for when it happened, and it reminded me that she'd been hospitalized and receiving Zofran. Because we were about to start another potentially QTc-prolonging medication, it helped me make the decision that, yes, we do want a baseline EKG today, just to know where she is before we start. That would have been a call I made without being 100% informed, or one I'd have had to phone her back about. It was really helpful to have it in the moment.

I also use Abridge when responding to patient messages. I’m able to provide much more detail in my responses. I recently suspected gout in a patient whose uric acid came back very high, and I asked Abridge for patient instructions on a low-purine diet. It generated them, and I copied them into the message after reviewing. Before, I would have offered a few details and suggested that she look up more information on her own. Instead, she got something much more robust, tailored to her record and grounded in best practice.

Where do you see Abridge Assistant having the biggest impact?

I truly feel like I'm learning more, and that my patients get more from me because of it. Even though we've come a long way on our quality and safety journey in healthcare, I don't think we always appreciate how much harm still comes from medical error and from quick decisions that aren't fully informed. That's hard to capture.

Want to hear from more clinicians like Kristin? Check out the rest of the series on our newsfeed here. And if you’re curious how Abridge Assistant could fit into your workflow, head to the Assistant page on our website to learn more.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.