Healthcare artificial intelligence startup Suki on Wednesday announced a new collaboration with Google cloud as part of its push to expand beyond clinical documentation.
Through the partnership, Suki is creating patient summaries and Q&A features 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 their patient visits and automatically convert them into clinical notes, helping doctors avoid the headache of manually typing all that information.
The new Google Cloud features will allow Suki to provide doctors with more assistive technology while providing care to patients, the startup said.
It is the next frontier for the company founded seven years ago.
“We never really built just a clinical documentation tool, it was supposed to be an assistant,” Punit Soni, founder and CEO of Suki, told CNBC. “An assistant can help you with documentation, but they can also start doing other things.”
Doctors will be able to use Suki's platform, for example, to quickly ask questions and get relevant information about a patient's medical history, said Soni, who previously worked for several years as a Google employee.
Suki's new summary feature will allow doctors to read a patient's basic biographical information, visit history, and reason for their visit with just one click. The summary shows details such as the patient's age, chronic conditions, previous prescriptions, and other problems, such as “low back pain.”
Gathering all that data automatically could help doctors save the 15 to 30 minutes they spend each time searching for it themselves, Soni said.
If doctors have more specific questions about a patient, they can click the Suki Q&A button to enter their queries. They can send messages such as “Show me your A1C for the last three months in graph form,” “What vaccines did the patient take?” or “When was your last EKG?”
Suki's patient summary feature is available to a select group of doctors starting Wednesday, with general availability coming early next year, the company said. The new Q&A feature will also be generally available early next year.
The initial version of Suki's Q&A feature will be equipped to answer questions based on individual patient data, but the company said it plans to expand the scope eventually. Suki's summary and Q&A features will be at no additional cost to your customers.
“To me, this is actually a broader trend of AI design, or AI, in healthcare,” Soni said.
Suki's technology is used by 350 health systems and clinics in the US, and the startup tripled its customer base this year, the company said. The company's new offerings could help it stand out in a fiercely competitive market.
Administrative workloads are a leading cause of burnout for healthcare workers across the United States, meaning industry executives are eager to find solutions. Doctors spend nearly 28 hours a week on administrative tasks, including nearly nine hours on documentation alone, according to a study published by Google Cloud in October.
As a result, documentation tools that aim to help reduce these workloads, like Suki's, have gained popularity this year and investors are paying attention.
Suki closed a $70 million funding round in October and rival startup Abridge announced a $150 million funding round in February. Microsoft subsidiary Nuance Communications, which Microsoft acquired for $16 billion in 2021, also offers a popular AI documentation tool for doctors.
“Just like what happened with the Internet, AI is also happening now,” Soni said.
