Suki announced the expansion of its ambient artificial intelligence technology, Suki Assistant, to more than 20 independent practices, including Capital City Primary and Immediate Care.

The application is a voice assistant that generates notes in real-time by listening to patient-clinician interactions. It can be used for clinical documentation, diagnosis coding, real-time information retrieval from the electronic health record and other applications.

The company recently expanded the platform's capabilities to support those in inpatient settings to work across hospital, ambulatory, telehealth, skilled nursing facilities and home health. Assistant has an ambient mode that leverages generative AI to auto-generate clinical notes based on conversations.

Ambient AI refers to artificial intelligence systems that seamlessly integrate into daily life, often without the user noticing. Operating in the background, these solutions collect data, process information and generate content to enhance experiences without requiring direct input from users.

"Generated content can be easily accepted, edited, or rejected by the clinician and once the note is finalized, it is sent back to the EHR," explains Punit Soni, founder and CEO of Suki. "We support bidirectional integration with all major EHRs, including Epic, Cerner, Meditech, and Athena."

This allows clinicians to expedite the creation of documentation with greater ease and efficiency, thereby alleviating cognitive load and reducing time spent on administrative tasks, as well as flexibility to clinicians in how they create their notes.

"They can start their note in the EHR, sync it to Suki, and use Suki in ambient mode to generate remaining content, or they can start their note in Suki and finish it in the EHR," he says.

Any permutation between the EHR and Suki is possible because the integration keeps the note content in sync in real time. Once notes are done, they are synced back to the system of record.

Soni says Suki aims to reimagine the healthcare tech stack, making it invisible and assistive to lift the administrative burden from clinicians.

"Suki works across all platforms including iOS, Android, web, Windows, and Mac to ensure as many clinicians can benefit from the technology and includes dictation and command modes along with ambient note generation," he explains.

This can help CIOs harmonize the number of solutions they support because with Suki, they don’t need separate solutions for ambient-note generation and dictation. Suki is meant to do both.

"Many medical protocols weren’t designed with clinicians’ workflows in mind, so time and resources are often inefficiently allocated to tasks such as administrative work, which can be voice-enabled," Soni says. "However, clinicians' input is crucial to ensuring maximum benefit, so it is central to Suki’s product development process."

He points out the U.S. spends nearly $4 trillion on healthcare annually, and administrative costs account for a quarter of that amount.

"With such economic pressure on health systems and documentation burden driving clinicians out of medicine, Suki’s innovative solutions have proven to be much needed for both clinicians and health systems," Soni says.

He claims Suki increases health system revenue by increasing patient encounter volumes by 5%, leading to more than $21,000 incremental annual revenue per user, and increases clinician satisfaction and retention.

Nathan Eddy is a healthcare and technology freelancer based in Berlin.
Email the writer: nathaneddy@gmail.com
Twitter: @dropdeaded209