This week, Silicon Valley-based startup Suki added new capabilities to its AI assistant, helping the product stand out in the increasingly crowded healthcare AI space.
Suki — which was founded in 2017 and had raised $165 million in venture capital — seeks to lighten physicians’ documentation burden through its AI-powered voice assistant.
By calling out to the AI assistant, a physician can quickly access key information about their patient, such as their medications, vital signs, allergies or surgical histories. Physicians can also use Suki’s tool to do things like dictate clinical notes, pull up their weekly schedule and assist with ICD-10 coding.
Following this week’s announcement, the AI assistant now includes patient summaries and Q&A functionality.
The new patient summary feature reduces information overload for physicians by giving them quick access to relevant medical information that will help them form care plans, said Suki CEO Punit Soni.
“A clinician can prepare for an upcoming patient appointment by viewing a concise summary of the patient’s past appointments in Suki. The summary includes pertinent details from those appointments, saving clinicians time and mental energy from having to manually review individual encounter notes,” he explained.
Soni pointed out that Suki’s new Q&A feature also saves time for physicians, as it allows them to ask questions about their patient and receive answers immediately.
For example, a physician may ask Suki’s assistant questions about a patient’s chart data, such as “When was the patient’s last EKG?” Suki’s tool then pulls the relevant information, such as the date and the results from the last test, from the EHR, Soni stated.
Suki’s assistant can also answer medical reference questions — such as what interactions certain drugs have — by searching and summarizing information from validated sources, he added.
These two new features may help Suki differentiate itself from other digital health companies selling AI-powered tools to help with documentation and coding, such as Abridge, DeepScribe and Microsoft.
“As far as we know, no other AI healthcare assistants in the market offer patient summary and Q&A capabilities. With these capabilities, Suki AI Assistant becomes the first end-to-end clinical assistant that can help with a wide range of administrative tasks, not just documentation,” Soni declared.
Suki built the new capabilities in collaboration with Google Cloud. The startup chose Google Cloud as its tech development partner because the company has “very sophisticated technology” that can quickly search across various data sources and formats, Soni said.
More than 300 healthcare providers use Suki’s AI assistant, he noted. Some of the startup’s health system customers include Ascension St. Thomas, Ozarks Healthcare, Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System, St. Mary’s Healthcare, Golden Valley Memorial Healthcare and Goshen Health.
“A select group of clinicians at health systems” are already using the patient summary feature, and broader availability will come soon after, Soni stated. As for the Q&A feature, he said availability will begin sometime next year.
Credit: MR.Cole_Photographer, Getty Images