Healthcare artificial intelligence startup Suki announced on Wednesday a partnership with Google cloud as part of its efforts to go beyond clinical documentation.
Through this partnership, Suki is building patient summaries and Q&A capabilities using Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform, which allows developers to train, tune and deploy different AI models and applications.
Suki’s flagship product, called Suki Assistant, allows doctors to record patient visits and automatically convert them into clinical notes, helping doctors avoid the hassle of manually writing down all this information.
The startup said the new capabilities in Google Cloud will allow Suki to provide more assistive technology as clinicians provide care to patients.
This is the next frontier for the seven-year-old company.
“We’ve never really built a clinical documentation tool, it’s supposed to be an assistant,” Suki founder and CEO Punit Soni told CNBC. “The assistant can help you with documentation, but it can also start doing other things.”
For example, doctors will be able to use Suki’s platform to quickly ask questions and pull out relevant information about patients’ medical histories. Suki, who worked at Google for several years,
Suki’s new summary feature will allow clinicians to read a patient’s basic biographical information, visit history and reason for visit with just one click. The summary shows details such as the patient’s age, chronic conditions, past prescriptions, and other issues (such as “low back pain”).
Soni says that automatically aggregating all this data can help doctors save 15 to 30 minutes each time they spend searching for data on their own.
If clinicians have more specific questions for their patients, they can click on Suki’s Q&A button to enter the question. They can submit prompts such as “Graphically display his A1C values over the past three months,” “What vaccinations 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 a general rollout early next year, the company said. The new Q&A feature will also be fully rolled out early next year.
The initial version of Suki’s Q&A feature will answer questions based on individual patient data, but the company says it plans to eventually expand the scope. Suki’s snippets and Q&A features come at no additional cost to its customers.
“To me, this is actually a larger trend in artificial intelligence design or artificial intelligence in health care,” Sony said.
Suki’s technology is used by 350 health systems and clinics in the United States, and the startup’s customer base has tripled this year, the company said. The company’s new products could help it stand out in a fiercely competitive market.
Administrative workload is a leading cause of burnout among U.S. health care workers, which means senior executives in the industry are desperate for solutions. According to one clinician, clinicians spend nearly 28 hours per week performing administrative tasks, including nearly 9 hours just processing files. study Released by Google Cloud in October.
As a result, documentation tools that claim to help reduce this workload, such as Suki’s, have gained popularity this year and caught the attention of investors.
Suki closed one $70 million A funding round in October, rival startup Abridge announced US$150 million A funding round in February. Nuance Communications, a Microsoft subsidiary that Microsoft acquired for $16 billion in 2021, also provides doctors with a popular artificial intelligence documentation tool.
“Just like the emergence of the Internet, artificial intelligence is happening now,” Sony said.
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