The department plans to expand the technology to select outpatient care providers. #
The Department of Veterans Affairs will continue to allow its medical facilities to use the Abridge ambient scribe under a new enterprise contract, according to a Tuesday press release from Abridge.
The multi-award contract has a total ceiling of $775.72 million over five years across all vendors who are eligible to compete for task orders, the release says.
“It is an honor to support the clinicians who care for our nation's Veterans. We’ve worked to earn trust by meeting them where they are and preserving clinical context across providers, specialties, care settings, and the EHR migration,” said Dr. Shiv Rao, CEO and co-founder of Abridge, in the release.
The department previously announced plans to expand ambient scribe technologies to select outpatient care providers with an enterprise contract extension.
The VA began piloting ambient scribes, which record veteran-provider conversations with patient consent, from Abridge and Knowtex in October 2025. Since then, all VA Patient Aligned Care Teams’ primary care providers, behavioral health interdisciplinary program practitioners, physical medicine, rehabilitation practitioners and medical and surgical specialists can use the ambient scribe, Nextgov/FCW previously reported.
Knowtex deferred a request for comment as it waits to hear back from VA Contracting Office staff. The VA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Abridge says its ambient scribe has the advantage of being the only one to currently integrate with legacy and new VA electronic health records at more than 75 medical centers.
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