Suki and Google Cloud Expand Supportive Health Technology Partnership
Healthcare artificial intelligence startup Suki announced a new collaboration with on Wednesday Google Cloud as part of its effort to expand beyond clinical documentation.
As part of the partnership, Suki will create patient summaries and Q&A features using Google Cloud's Vertex AI platform, which enables developers to train, tune and deploy various AI models and applications.
Suki's flagship product called Suki Assistant allows doctors to record their visits to patients and automatically convert them into clinical notes, saving doctors the trouble of writing down all this information manually.
The new features with Google Cloud will allow Suki to provide physicians with more assistive technology in patient care, the startup said.
It's the next frontier for the seven-year-old company.
“We never really built just a clinical documentation tool, it was meant to be an assistant,” Punit Soni, the founder and CEO of Suki, told CNBC. “An assistant can help you with documentation, but also do other things.”
For example, doctors could use Suki's platform to quickly ask questions and retrieve relevant information about a patient's medical history, said Soni, who previously worked as an employee at Google for several years.
With Suki's new summary feature, physicians can review a patient's basic biographical information, visit history, and reason for the visit with just one click. The summary shows details such as the patient's age, chronic illnesses, previous prescriptions and other problems such as: B. “Lower back pain”.
Automatically merging all that data could help doctors save the 15 to 30 minutes they have to spend each time they search for it themselves, Soni said.
If doctors have more specific questions about a patient, they can click Suki's Q&A button to enter their questions. You can submit prompts such as “Show me a graph of his A1C for the last three months,” “What vaccinations has the patient received?”, or “When was his last electrocardiogram?”
Suki's patient summary feature will be available to a select group of physicians 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 first version of Suki's question-and-answer feature will be designed to answer questions based on individual patient data, but the company said it plans to expand the scope later. There is no additional charge to customers for Suki's summary and question-and-answer features.
“To me, this is actually a larger trend of AI design or AI verification of healthcare,” Soni said.
Suki's technology is used by 350 health systems and clinics in the U.S., and the startup has tripled its customer base this year, the company said. The company's new offerings could help it stand out in a highly competitive market.
Administrative workloads are a leading cause of burnout among U.S. healthcare workers, meaning leaders in the industry are looking for solutions. According to a study published by Google Cloud in October, clinicians spend nearly 28 hours per week on administrative tasks, including nearly nine hours on documentation alone.
As a result, documentation tools that purport to help reduce this workload, such as Suki's, are enjoying tremendous popularity this year and investors are paying close attention.
Suki closed a $70 million funding round in October, and rival startup Abridge announced a $150 million funding round in February. The Microsoft subsidiary Nuance Communications, which Microsoft acquired in 2021 for $16 billion, also offers a popular AI documentation tool for doctors.
“Just as the internet happened, AI is happening now,” Soni said.
