Motorists drive past the City-County Building on Ross Street in Downtown Pittsburgh on Tuesday, Seot. 1, 2026. A Pittsburgh-area woman is suing AHN and Highmark over their use of an technology. They paid for confidential care they did not receive. And their information now sits with a third party, indefinitely and outside their control.”
AHN began using Abridge in 2024, the complaint said, and it has expanded to approximately 400 AHN providers across business reasons to adopt this technology quickly, such as lightening clinicians’ note-writing burden, tightening up billing documentation, and, for Highmark, accelerating prior authorization for its health-plan members.
”These benefits came without a matching investment in lawful consent infrastructure, authorization protocols or adequate safeguards necessary to protect patients’ confidential information.”
Once Abridge is activated in the room, the lawsuit said, it listens continuously, sends the audio to the company’s infrastructure for processing and returns a draft note that gets folded into the patient’s electronic medical chart.
The information being collected, the complaint continued, holds monetary value. It saves the defendants money by reducing clinician documentation time, which therefore allows them to see more patients and bill more.
“This is not merely a theoretical allegation about the value of patient data,” the lawsuit said.
In June 2025, Abridge AI Inc. was valued at $5.3 billion — nearly double what it had been four months earlier — the plaintiff said.
Each patient visit, the lawsuit said, contributed incrementally to that multibillion-dollar growth.
”Plaintiff and class members received no share of that value, were not informed that their confidential medical communications were contributing to it and did not give informed consent to that use of their data,” the suit said.
The lawsuit seeks an injunction prohibiting the defendants from using Abridge or any other recording technology without providing clear disclosure and obtaining consent, as well as monetary damages.
An impact on healthcare
Irene Y. Chen, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who studies AI in healthcare, said patients can benefit from the use of recording programs like Abridge because they may feel their doctors are more present — talking to them instead of typing notes into a laptop.
“Clinicians and other medical staff face tremendous burdens and workloads these days. Physician burnout is at an all-time high,” Chen said. “The goal of this technology is to make medical documentation easier so that doctors can focus on connecting with patients.”
However, in her research, she has found a high volume of errors in AI deployment systems, including with medications and when a patient provides the history of their current illness.
“Although these tools are not marketed as making clinical decisions, errors can compound and affect clinical care,” Chen said.
She believes AI scribes could be hugely impactful in healthcare, but there must be careful review to ensure the technology is used responsibly.
“Right now, these systems are deployed without <a Death by Cyanide." She can be reached at pward@triblive.com.
