Suki and Google Cloud Expand Supportive Health Technology Partnership

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

As a part of the partnership, Suki will create patient summaries and Q&A features using Google Cloud's Vertex AI platform, which enables developers to coach, tune and deploy various AI models and applications.

Suki's flagship product called Suki Assistant allows doctors to record their visits to patients and robotically convert them into clinical notes, saving doctors the difficulty of writing down all this information manually.

The recent features with Google Cloud will allow Suki to supply physicians with more assistive technology in patient care, the startup said.

It's the subsequent 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 details about a patient's medical history, said Soni, who previously worked as an worker at Google for several years.

With Suki's recent summary feature, physicians can review a patient's basic biographical information, visit history, and reason for the visit with only one click. The summary shows details similar to the patient's age, chronic illnesses, previous prescriptions and other problems similar to: B. “Lower back pain”.

Automatically merging all that data could help doctors save the 15 to half-hour they must spend every time they seek for it themselves, Soni said.

If doctors have more specific questions on a patient, they’ll click Suki's Q&A button to enter their questions. You can submit prompts similar to “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 shall be available to a select group of physicians starting Wednesday, with general availability coming early next 12 months, the corporate said. The recent Q&A feature can even be generally available early next 12 months.

The first version of Suki's question-and-answer feature shall be designed to reply questions based on individual patient data, but the corporate said it plans to expand the scope later. There is not any 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 utilized by 350 health systems and clinics within the U.S., and the startup has tripled its customer base this 12 months, the corporate said. The company's recent offerings could help it stand out in a highly competitive market.

Administrative workloads are a number one reason behind burnout amongst U.S. healthcare employees, meaning leaders within the industry are searching for solutions. According to at least one study, clinicians spend nearly 28 hours per week on administrative tasks, including nearly nine hours on documentation alone study released by Google Cloud in October.

As a result, documentation tools that claim to assist reduce these workloads, similar to: B. Suki, enormously popular this 12 months, and investors are paying close attention.

Suki included 70 million dollars funding round in October, and rival startup Abridge announced one 150 million dollars Financing round in February. The Microsoft subsidiary Nuance Communications, which Microsoft acquired in 2021 for $16 billion, also offers a preferred AI documentation tool for doctors.

“Just as the internet happened, AI is happening now,” Soni said.

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