Healthcare AI startup Suki has announced significant updates to its flagship product, Suki Assistant, in collaboration with Google Cloud. By leveraging Google’s Vertex AI platform, the assistant now offers patient summarization and a clinical Q&A feature—two tools designed to reduce the time clinicians spend on administrative tasks while improving access to actionable insights during patient care.
Key Points
- Suki Assistant now provides patient summaries and clinical Q&A, powered by Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform.
- These features streamline access to patient data, cutting the time clinicians spend on administrative tasks.
- Clinicians can query patient information conversationally, enhancing decision-making and reducing burnout.
- Suki plans broader availability of the features in 2025, with initial rollout to select clinicians starting now.
These enhancements mark a pivotal step in Suki’s vision to transform healthcare technology into an “invisible and assistive” presence, says CEO Punit Soni. "Today marks a milestone in Suki’s history: becoming the industry’s first end-to-end AI assistant. These features change the paradigm of how clinicians access and consume data that informs care decisions."
How It Works: The new patient summarization feature extracts critical information from electronic health records (EHRs) and condenses it into digestible summaries. This allows clinicians to quickly review a patient’s history, including biographical details, chronic conditions, and past prescriptions, saving them the 15-30 minutes typically spent piecing this information together manually.
The clinical Q&A feature takes things a step further by enabling doctors to query patient records and clinical guidelines conversationally. Using natural language prompts such as “What’s this patient’s A1C over the last three months?” or “When was their last electrocardiogram?”, the tool retrieves and organizes relevant data instantly. This capability is powered by Google Cloud’s FHIR API and Vertex AI Search for Healthcare.
Why It Matters: Administrative tasks account for nearly half of a clinician’s workload in the U.S., contributing significantly to burnout and diminishing time for direct patient care. Suki’s new features aim to alleviate this burden. "Just like the internet happened, AI is also happening now," Soni said. “We’re here to make it easier for clinicians to do what they do best: care for patients.”
What’s Next? The patient summarization feature is available to select clinicians today, with general availability expected early next year. Clinical Q&A is slated for release in 2025. These tools will be provided at no additional cost to Suki’s users, which now include over 350 health systems and clinics across the U.S.
Suki’s latest move underscores the broader trend of “AI-ification” in healthcare. As the industry faces mounting challenges from workforce shortages to ballooning administrative costs, AI-powered solutions like Suki Assistant could play an increasingly central role in improving efficiency and care quality.