Health AI startup Suki expands partnership with Google Cloud to deliver more assistive tech for clinicians

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

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

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

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

It is the next frontier for the seven-year-old company. 

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

Doctors will be able to use Suki’s platform, for instance, to quickly ask questions and pull up relevant information about a patient’s medical history, said Soni, who previously spent several years as an employee at Google.

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

Pulling together all of that data automatically could help save doctors the 15 to 30 minutes they spend each time they search for it themselves, Soni said.

If clinicians have more specific questions about a patient, they can click Suki’s Q&A button to type in their queries. They can submit prompts such as, “Show me his A1C over 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 available to a select group of clinicians starting Wednesday, with general availability coming early next year, the company said. The new Q&A feature will also be generally 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 broaden the scope eventually. Suki’s summarization and Q&A features will not come at an additional cost to its customers.

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

Suki’s technology is used by 350 health systems and clinics in the U.S., and the startup tripled its client base this year, the company said. The company’s new offerings could help it stand out within a fiercely competitive market. 

Administrative workloads are a major cause of burnout for health-care workers across the U.S., which means executives in the industry are eager for solutions. Clinicians spend nearly 28 hours a week on administrative tasks, including almost nine hours on documentation alone, according to a study published by Google Cloud in October. 

As a result, documentation tools that claim to help reduce these workloads, such as 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’s subsidiary Nuance Communications, which Microsoft acquired for $16 billion in 2021, also offers a popular AI documentation tool for doctors.  

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