Sharp HealthCare Chooses Abridge for Clinical Documentation, Enabling Clinicians to Focus on Care

News

Sharp HealthCare Chooses Abridge for Clinical Documentation, Enabling Clinicians to Focus on Care—Not Coding

2025-04-10 20:30 Last Updated At：20:41

SAN DIEGO & SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Apr 10, 2025--

Sharp HealthCare, the largest integrated health system in San Diego, is implementing the Abridge generative AI platform across the enterprise to create comprehensive, compliant, and billable documentation, enabling clinicians to fully focus on caring for patients. Abridge will now be deployed across Sharp HealthCare locations, which support more than one million patients annually.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250410805726/en/

Medical records serve many purposes and stakeholders. They are the health record for patients, a guide for other clinicians on the care team, and a part of how clinicians receive compensation for the care provided.

“If you didn't write it down, it didn't happen,” said Dr. Brian Lichtenstein, a hospitalist and Associate Chief Medical Information Officer (CMIO) of Acute Care at Sharp HealthCare. “With Abridge, we’re picking up on additional conditions our clinicians are treating that might have otherwise been lost. Even when you're trying to be exhaustive in your notes, you may document eight of ten things that you did, which is good, but getting all ten is great and helps us realize more of the value of what we deliver.”

Abridge’s capability to support clinicians and health systems in capturing all of the value they deliver is enabled by the platform’s Contextual Reasoning Engine, an AI architecture that generates compliant, structured, and billable notes, in real-time, at the point of care.

“A colleague told me that Abridge more completely captures all the work he is doing,” said Dr. Elan Hekier, Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine Physician and CMIO of Sharp Rees-Stealy Medical Group, a Sharp HealthCare physician practice. “It even captured a diagnosis he says he would have missed. It was during the exam and he had forgotten about it by the end of the long visit. But Abridge appropriately added that diagnosis.”

Following a pilot in which Abridge was rigorously tested across specialties, languages, and care settings, Sharp HealthCare clinicians experienced:

This data was collected using a pre-post survey and included a self-reported 10% increase in clinicians’ ability to see additional patients that needed urgent attention.

“I’m Spanish-speaking, and sometimes I speak in Spanglish with my patients. Abridge’s HPI and A&P always pick up way more than I used to catch, regardless of the language,” said Dr. Nicole Tremain, an internal medicine clinician as well as Associate CMIO at the Sharp Community Medical Group, another Sharp HealthCare physician practice.

Abridge is now trusted by more than 100 of the largest and most complex health systems to deliver highly accurate clinical documentation relied upon by clinicians, patients, and revenue cycle professionals every day.

“Enterprise-grade healthcare AI removes barriers between patients and clinicians and delivers ROI for healthcare systems,” said Dr. Shiv Rao, CEO and Founder of Abridge. “The clinicians and AI scientists who designed Abridge understand the anxiety creating compliant, billable documentation can cause among clinicians—our mission is to relieve that burden so they can focus on delivering exceptional patient care.”

About Sharp HealthCare
Sharp HealthCare, San Diego's largest and most comprehensive health care delivery system, is recognized for clinical excellence in cardiac, cancer, multi-organ transplantation, neuroscience, orthopedics, rehabilitation, behavioral health, women's health and hospice services. Sharp HealthCare has been widely acclaimed for its commitment to transform the health care experience for patients, physicians and staff through an organization-wide performance improvement initiative called The Sharp Experience. The Sharp HealthCare system includes four acute-care hospitals, four specialty hospitals, three affiliated medical groups, a health plan and numerous outpatient facilities and programs, including the Sharp Prebys Innovation & Education Center. To learn more about Sharp, visit Sharp Health News.

About Abridge
Abridge was founded in 2018 to power deeper understanding in healthcare. The enterprise-grade AI platform transforms medical conversations into clinically useful and billable documentation at the point of care, reducing administrative burden and clinician burnout while improving patient experience. With deep EHR integration, support for 28+ languages, and 50+ specialties, Abridge is used across a wide range of care settings, including outpatient, emergency department, and inpatient.

Abridge’s enterprise-grade AI platform is purpose-built for healthcare. Supported by Linked Evidence, Abridge is the only solution that maps AI-generated summaries to source data, helping clinicians quickly trust and verify the output. As a pioneer in generative AI for healthcare, Abridge is setting the industry standard for the responsible deployment of AI across health systems.

Abridge was recently awarded Best in KLAS for Ambient AI segment in addition to other accolades, including TIME Best Inventions of 2024, 2024 Forbes AI 50 List, and Fortune’s 2024 AI 50 Innovators.

Man sentenced to 53 years in prison in hate-crime attack on Palestinian American boy, mother

2025-05-03 03:19 Last Updated At：03:20

JOLIET, Ill. (AP) — An Illinois landlord who killed a 6-year-old Muslim boy and severely injured the boy's mother in a brutal hate-crime attack days after the war in Gaza began was sentenced Friday to 53 years in prison.

Joseph Czuba, 73, was found guilty in February of murder, attempted murder and hate-crime charges in the death of Wadee Alfayoumi and the wounding of his mother, Hanan Shaheen.

Judge Amy Bertani-Tomczak sentenced Czuba to 30 years in the boy's death and another 20 years consecutively for the attack on Shaheen. The judge also sentenced him to three years imprisonment for hate crimes. The length of the sentence makes it all but certain he will die behind bars.

“No sentence can restore what was taken, but today’s outcome delivers a necessary measure of justice,” said Ahmed Rehab, Executive Director of CAIR-Chicago. “Wadee was an innocent child. He was targeted because of who he was—Muslim, Palestinian, and loved."

Czuba did not speak during the sentencing. Czuba's attorney, Lenard, declined comment. Will County State’s Attorney James Glasgow’s office issued a statement calling Czuba a “morally reprehensible killer" and the impact of his actions “truly unfathomable.”

The boy's great-uncle, Mahmoud Yousef, was the only family member who spoke during the hearing. He said that no matter the sentence length it wouldn't be enough. The boy's parents had plans for him and Czuba robbed them of that, he said.

Yousef asked Czuba to explain why he attacked the boy and his mother, asking him what news he heard that provoked him, but Czuba did not respond, the Chicago Tribune reported.

Czuba targeted them in October 2023 because of their Islamic faith and as a response to the war between Israel and Hamas, prosecutors said during the trial.

Evidence at trial included harrowing testimony from Shaheen and her frantic 911 call, along with bloody crime scene photos and police video. Jurors deliberated less than 90 minutes before handing in a verdict.

The family had been renting rooms in Czuba’s home in Plainfield, about 40 miles (64 kilometers) from Chicago when the attack happened.

Central to prosecutors' case was harrowing testimony from the boy’s mother, who said Czuba attacked her before moving on to her son, insisting they had to leave because they were Muslim. Prosecutors also played the 911 call and showed police footage. Czuba's wife, Mary, whom he has since divorced, also testified for the prosecution, saying he had become agitated about the Israel-Hamas war, which had erupted days earlier.

Police said Czuba pulled a knife from a holder on a belt and stabbed the boy 26 times, leaving the knife in the child's body. Some of the bloody crime scene photos were so explicit that the judge agreed to turn television screens showing them away from the audience, which included Wadee's relatives.

“He could not escape,” Michael Fitzgerald, a Will County assistant state’s attorney, told jurors at trial. “If it wasn’t enough that this defendant killed that little boy, he left the knife in the little boy’s body.”

The jury deliberated for 90 minutes before returning a verdict.

The attack renewed fears of anti-Muslim discrimination and hit particularly hard in Plainfield and surrounding suburbs, which have a large and established Palestinian community. Wadee's funeral drew large crowds and Plainfield officials have dedicated a park playground in his honor.

Shaheen had more than a dozen stab wounds and it took her weeks to recover.

She said there were no prior issues in the two years she rented from the Czubas, even sharing a kitchen and a living room. Then after the start of the war, Czuba told her that they had to move out because Muslims were not welcome. He later confronted Shaheen and attacked her, holding her down, stabbing her and trying to break her teeth.

“He told me ‘You, as a Muslim, must die,’” said Shaheen, who testified at trial in English and Arabic though a translator.

Police testified that officers found Czuba outside the house, sitting on the ground with blood on his body and hands.

Separately, lawsuits have been filed over the boy’s death, including by his father, Odai Alfayoumi, who is divorced from Shaheen and was not living with them. The U.S. Department of Justice also launched a federal hate crimes investigation.

Yousef told reporters after the hearing that Czuba was a grandfather figure to Wadee and the family doesn’t understand what “fake news” Czuba may have heard about the war in Gaza that caused him to attack the boy and his mother. People need to understand Muslims before judging them, he said.

“Some people are bringing this war to this country,” Yousef said. “We cannot do that. We can’t bring the war here. We cannot bring hatred to this country . . . we need that to stop.”

This story has been updated to correct the spelling of ‘Mahmoud.'