Suki Opens Ambient Clinical AI Assistant to 20+ Independent Medical Practices
Clinical voice AI startup Suki has brought its ambient documentation assistant to more than 20 independent medical practices, which are often left lagging when it comes to accessing new healthcare technology of this sort. That these healthcare providers are racing to adopt Suki suggests that clinician demand for AI assistants to handle administrative tasks is just as high as it was during the first waves of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Suki Success
Suki provides a voice assistant for medical professionals. The Suki Assistant can use generative AI to turn the audio of a patient-doctor conversation into case notes and fill out Electronic Health Records (EHRs) with the relevant data. The company claims to shrink the time doctors spend on paperwork by as much as 72%. Suki has been known for signing deals with major hospital groups and healthcare software giants like Epic, a company with medical records for nearly 80% of patients in the U.S. and 3% of the world’s patients. Suki also counts major EHR players like Cerner, athenahealth, and Elation Health among the approximately 100 health system clients currently employing its medical voice AI startup’s services.
The new, smaller practices employing Suki have historically lacked access to leading-edge AI tools relative to large health systems. Reducing burnout for all clinicians drove Suki’s focus on affordability and easy implementation. Early adopters praised Suki’s accuracy, ease of use, and support for more engaged patient encounters.
“Suki does a great job at creating documentation and only seems to be getting better,” Dr. Stefan Huber, a family medicine physician with Tinovus Health, said in a statement. “Not only are we saving mental energy and time, we’re now able to better focus on patient care and build more engaged, meaningful relationships with our patients.”
Suki has regularly upgraded its system, including adding a mobile app, creating its Show Me tools for pulling data from the EHRs by voice command and developing the Suki Speech Service (S3) platform. The company recently started deploying inpatient care settings and more personalization as well. The improvements are fueled both through revenue and the $95 million the startup has raised, including a $55 million round at the end of 2021 and two $20 million rounds in 2020 and 2018.
“At Suki, we aim to design products and solutions that work in service of the clinician. We want our impact to be far-reaching and help as many people as possible which is why we are so proud of this progress. Larger health systems have the means to test new technologies, but those at smaller practices tend to be forgotten, yet are feeling the effects of burnout just the same,” Suki CEO Punit Soni explained. “We have dedicated significant time and resources to making a solution that is powered by technology, not people, and integrates with commonly used EHRs, at a price point that is affordable to healthcare organizations of all sizes.”
Suki still faces plenty of rivals in healthcare conversational AI. Fellow startups like Abridge and Notable jockey for market share, as do more specialized medical providers like dental-focused Bola and veterinarian-centered Talktoo. There’s also the presence of giants like Microsoft, whose $19.7 billion purchase of Nuance Communications brought clinical AI platform Saykara into its fold. Epic even inked a deal with Microsoft for access to OpenAI’s GPT-4 generative AI model after Nuance launched the Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX) using GPT-4 to transcribe and summarize patient interactions with doctors.
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