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Published on
December 18, 2024
4 min read
Suki AI Partners With Google Cloud to Improve Assistive Tech in Healthcare
Health AI startup Suki has unveiled a new partnership with Google Cloud as part of its efforts to grow beyond clinical documentation.
CNBC reported that the new partnership is aimed at boosting Suki AI healthcare efforts to develop Q&A and patient summary features using the Vertex AI platform. This Google Cloud platform enables developers to tune, train, and deploy varying AI applications and models.
Improving Suki Assistant
Suki’s initial AI product, Suki Assistant, makes it easy for doctors to record patient visits and automatically convert them into clinical notes. By doing so, the AI assistant eliminates the menial task of taking notes manually.
Through the Suki Google Cloud partnership, the AI startup will push these capabilities a notch higher. It marks the next frontier for the company by offering Suki assistant users with a more assistive technology.
“We were never really building a clinical documentation tool only, it was supposed to be an assistant. An assistant can help you with documentation, but it can also start doing other things,” Suki Founder and CEO Punit Soni said.
Range of New Features
Suki says that leveraging all the patient data available could automatically save clinicians between 15 and 30 minutes that they spend searching patient information. Suki’s AI startup partnership with Google Cloud offers new features that enable doctors to ask questions first and retrieve relevant information about the medical history of their patients.
Doctors will also be able to read patient’s biographical information, their visit history, and their reason for visit with a single click. The Suki and Google Cloud features will generate summaries for users highlighting details like patient’s age, chronic illnesses, previous prescriptions, and any other medical problems.
Where doctors have specific questions regarding a patient, they can use the AI startup’s Q&A button to enter queries. Users can query the patient database using prompts such as ‘What vaccines did the patient take?’ or ‘show me his last A1C’.
“To me, this is actually a larger trend of the AI design, or AI-ification, of health care”, Soni added.
The patient summary feature is already available to selected clinicians. Suki says general availability of this feature and the Q&A will commence early 2025. The company says that initially, the Q&A feature will respond to queries based on patient data. However, the Suki will expand this scope with time. Users will not pay more to use the new features.
Addressing Health Pain Points
Suki’s healthcare technology is designed to address pain points in delivery of health services in the US. Administrative tasks are a leading cause of burnouts among healthcare workers in the country that medical executives are keen to address. Overally, clinicians spend close to 28 hours each week performing administrative tasks. This includes close to 9 hours on patient documentation alone.
Tech tools that automate these tasks like Suki have gained popularity and attracted investors. In October 2024, the company closed a $70 million funding round. Currently, Suki’s tech solution is being used by 350 clinics and health systems across the US. The healthcare AI startup tripled its customer base this year. Suki is looking to stand out in the highly competitive market with its new offerings.
