Suki, Google Cloud expand partnership on assistive health tech

Health-care artificial intelligence startup Suki on Wednesday announced a latest collaboration with Google Cloud as a part of its push to expand beyond clinical documentation. 

Through the partnership, Suki is constructing patient summary and Q&A features using Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform, which allows developers to coach, tune and deploy different AI models and applications. 

Suki’s flagship product, called Suki Assistant, allows doctors to record their visits with patients and robotically turn them into clinical notes, helping physicians avoid the headache of manually writing out all of that information.

The brand new features with Google Cloud will allow Suki to supply clinicians with more assistive tech as they supply care to patients, the startup said. 

It’s the subsequent frontier for the seven-year-old company. 

“We were never really constructing a clinical documentation tool only, it was speculated to be an assistant,” Punit Soni, the founder and CEO of Suki, told CNBC. “An assistant can aid you with documentation, but it could actually also start doing other things.”

Doctors will have the ability to make use of Suki’s platform, as an example, to quickly ask questions and pull up relevant details about a patient’s medical history, said Soni, who previously spent several years as an worker at Google.

Suki’s latest summary feature will allow clinicians to read up on a patient’s basic biographical information, visit history and reason for coming in with only one click. The summary shows details reminiscent of the patient’s age, chronic conditions, past prescriptions and other problems, reminiscent of “low back pain.” 

Pulling together all of that data robotically could help save doctors the 15 to half-hour they spend every time they seek for it themselves, Soni said.

If clinicians have more specific questions on a patient, they will click Suki’s Q&A button to type of their queries. They’ll submit prompts reminiscent of, “Show me his A1C during the last three months as a graph,” “What vaccines did the patient take?” or “When was his last electrocardiogram?”

Suki’s patient summarization feature is offered to a select group of clinicians starting Wednesday, with general availability coming early next 12 months, the corporate said. The brand new Q&A feature can even be generally available early next 12 months.

The initial version of Suki’s Q&A feature will probably be equipped to reply questions based on individual patient data, but the corporate said it plans to broaden the scope eventually. Suki’s summarization and Q&A features won’t come at a further cost to its customers.

“To me, this is definitely a bigger trend of the AI design, or AI-ification, of health care,” Soni said. 

Suki’s technology is utilized by 350 health systems and clinics within the U.S., and the startup tripled its client base this 12 months, the corporate said. The corporate’s latest offerings could help it stand out inside a fiercely competitive market. 

Administrative workloads are a significant reason for burnout for health-care staff across the U.S., which implies executives within the industry are anticipating solutions. Clinicians spend nearly 28 hours every week on administrative tasks, including almost nine hours on documentation alone, based on a study published by Google Cloud in October. 

Because of this, documentation tools that claim to assist reduce these workloads, reminiscent of Suki’s, have exploded in popularity this 12 months, and investors are being attentive. 

Suki closed a $70 million funding round in October, and rival startup Abridge announced a $150 million funding round in February. Microsoft’s subsidiary Nuance Communications, which Microsoft acquired for $16 billion in 2021, also offers a well-liked AI documentation tool for doctors.  

“Similar to the web happened, AI can also be happening now,” Soni said.