Healthcare artificial intelligence startup Suki on Wednesday announced a new collaboration with. google cloud As part of an effort to expand beyond clinical documentation.
Through this partnership, Suki is building patient overview and Q&A capabilities using Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform. This allows developers to train, tune, and deploy various AI models and applications.
Suki’s flagship product, called Suki Assistant, allows doctors to record patient visits and automatically convert them into clinical notes, saving them the headache of manually writing out all the information. .
The new features in Google Cloud will enable Suki to offer more assistive technology to clinicians as they care for patients, the company said.
This is the next frontier for the seven-year-old company.
“We weren’t really just building a clinical documentation tool; it was meant to be an assistant,” Suki founder and CEO Punit Soni told CNBC. . “The assistant can help you with documentation, but you can also start doing other things.”
Soni, who previously worked at Google for several years, said doctors can use Suki’s platform to quickly ask questions about a patient’s medical history and obtain relevant information, for example.
Suki’s new summary feature allows clinicians to read a patient’s basic history, visit history, and reason for visit in one click. The summary shows details such as the patient’s age, chronic illnesses, past prescriptions, and other issues such as “back pain.”
Bringing all this data together automatically could save doctors the 15 to 30 minutes they would otherwise spend searching for the data themselves, Soni said.
If a clinician has more specific questions about a patient, they can click on Suki’s Q&A button and enter their questions. You can send prompts such as “Please show me a graph of his A1C for the past three months” or “What vaccines did the patient receive?” or “When was his last EKG?”
Suki’s patient summary feature will be available to a select group of clinicians starting Wednesday, with general availability early next year, the company said. A new Q&A feature will also be generally available early next year.
The initial version of Suki’s Q&A feature will include the ability to answer questions based on individual patient data, but the company said it plans to eventually expand its scope. Suki’s summary and Q&A features are available at no additional cost to customers.
“To me, this is really a larger trend of AI design, or AIization, in healthcare,” Soni said.
Suki’s technology is used by 350 health systems and clinics in the U.S., and the company says its customer base has tripled this year. The company’s new products could help it stand out in a fiercely competitive market.
Administrative workload is a leading cause of burnout among healthcare workers across the country, and industry executives are desperate for a solution. According to research published in October by Google Cloud, clinicians spend nearly 28 hours a week on administrative tasks, including nearly nine hours just on documentation.
As a result, document tools like Suki that claim to help reduce workloads have exploded in popularity this year, and investors are taking notice.
Suki closed a $70 million funding round in October, and rival startup Abridge announced a $150 million funding round in February. Nuance Communications, a subsidiary Microsoft acquired for $16 billion in 2021, also offers popular AI documentation tools for doctors.
“AI is happening now, just like the internet is happening,” Soni said.
