Suki and Google Cloud expand their healthcare assistive technology partnership

Healthcare artificial intelligence startup Suki announced a new collaboration with Google Cloud as part of its efforts to expand beyond clinical documentation.

Through this partnership, Suki creates patient summary and Q&A capabilities using Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform, which allows developers to train, tune and deploy different models and applications of AI.

Suki’s flagship product, called Suki Assistant, allows doctors to record their visits with patients and automatically turn them into clinical notes, saving doctors from having to manually write down all that information.

Google Cloud’s new features will allow Suki to provide clinicians with more assistive technology when providing patient care, the startup said.

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

“We never really built a clinical documentation tool alone, it was meant 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 an employee at Google.

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 illnesses, past prescriptions, and other issues, such as “low back pain.”

Automatically gathering all this data could save doctors 15 to 30 minutes each time they look it up themselves, Soni said.

If clinicians have more specific questions about a patient, they can click Suki’s Q&A button to enter their questions. They can submit prompts such as “Show me their A1C over the past three months in graph form,” “What vaccines has the patient taken?” » or “When was his last EKG?”

Suki’s patient summary feature is available to a select group of clinicians starting Wednesday, with general availability early next year, the company said. The new Q&A feature will also be 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 eventually expand the scope. Suki’s summary and Q&A features will not incur any additional cost to its customers.

“To me, this is actually a broader trend of AI design, or AI-ification, of healthcare,” Soni said.

Suki’s technology is used by 350 health systems and clinics in the United States, 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 fiercely competitive market.

Administrative workloads are a leading cause of burnout for healthcare workers in the United States, which means industry leaders are hungry for solutions. Clinicians spend nearly 28 hours per week on administrative tasks, including nearly nine hours on documentation alone, according to a study released by Google Cloud in October.

As a result, documentation tools claiming to help reduce these workloads, like Suki’s, have exploded in 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, acquired by Microsoft for $16 billion in 2021, also offers a popular AI documentation tool for doctors.

“Just like the Internet came into existence, AI also exists today,” Soni said.