Voice AI company Suki helps reduce the burden of documentation on the clinician, and alleviates burnout, by allowing them to focus on patient care. The company’s offerings include Suki Assistant, which helps clinicians save time on administrative tasks by generating notes ambiently, by taking dictation and commands, simplifying coding, and answering clinical questions by retrieving relevant chart data from the EHR, as well as Suki Platform, the engine that powers Suki Assistant, and is available for companies that are looking to further their solutions’ proficiencies with AI and voice.
On Thursday, the company announced a new feature within Suki Assistant: the capability to generate and stage prescription orders from ambient visits.
With this new capability, clinicians are able to speak their recommended prescription orders and then Suki will be able to structure, code, and stage the order. Clinicians can then submit the note, and then review and sign off on it.
“Suki has seen the growing demand for new technology solutions that can address the continued administrative challenges clinicians face day-to-day. Suki’s AI Assistant has already successfully reduced documentation time for clinicians by up to 72%. After documentation, orders is the next bucket of administrative work that is tedious and time consuming, so it was a natural next step to tackle this problem with AI,” Punit Soni, CEO and founder of Suki, told VatorNews.
This new feature was developed at the request of clinicians, Soni said, as orders are among clinicians’ most time-consuming administrative tasks and can take up to 1.4 hours every 8-hour shift.
“Many of Suki’s clinicians have expressed how time-consuming orders can be and, inevitably, their impact on delaying patient care. Suki Assistant will enable clinicians to initiate the proper next steps in the patient care journey more quickly, allowing them to improve the patient experience,” he explained.
“Clinicians frequently manually input and search for orders across multiple tabs in their EHR. This, in addition to the fact that many orders require individual acceptances for verification, leads to a less-than-optimal and incredibly time-consuming process that can delay patient care and contribute to clinician burnout, which is why many clinicians have been eagerly awaiting a solution.”
This feature will initially be rolled out to users of athenahealth’s EHR via the athenahealth Marketplace, and the company says that expansion to additional EHR partners is already planned for the coming weeks.
Founded in 2016, Suki raised a $70 million funding round in October, and since then has partnered with Zoom to integrate AI-driven clinical notes into Zoom’s Workplace for Clinicians solution, designed to improve user experience and patient care. Following the partnership, Suki also announced an investment from Zoom Ventures, enabling the company to continue the evolution of its technology and AI capabilities.
In December, the company entered into a new partnership with Google Cloud to equip Suki Assistant with new capabilities, patient summary and Q&A, to expedite the decision-making process and reduce information overload for doctors.
More recently, Suki partnered with academic health system Rush to roll out Suki’s capabilities enterprise-wide after successfully deploying its AI Assistant in summer 2024. In addition, Rush is also co-developing a next-generation AI-powered dictation feature with Suki.
“Suki wants to continue expanding its capabilities to make Suki Assistant the first one to truly accomplish all tasks that take up clinician time outside of face-to-face patient care, and orders are our next step in this mission,” said Soni.
“As AI capabilities continue to develop across the market, Suki will continue to increase the surface area of tasks that it can help clinicians with, saving time and reducing cognitive burden so they can focus on what’s most important: their patients.”
(Image source: suki.ai)
