In short: Suki founder and CEO Punit Soni recently took to social media touting the Redwood City-based company’s Suki AI for doctors, a digital assistant the company says will someday unburden medical professionals from the distractions of healthcare documentation. More specifically, the company hopes to utilize the AI as a means to automate the process of filling out notes and other documents for doctors. It will also incorporate machine learning to become more personalized to the nuances of individual doctors over time. The goal is to make the practice more hands-on and patient-focused by mitigating paperwork that interrupts visits with a practical, intelligent, inexpensive, and scalable mobile solution.
Background: Healthcare has increasingly become a primary point of focus for artificial intelligence-related projects over the past several years. Alphabet Inc. subsidiaries such as Google and DeepMind, for example, have placed emphasis on detecting diseases earlier using AI to assist in medical scans as well as symptom and history analysis. Google has also taken a similar approach to healthcare-related documentation with its own Medical Digital Assist project. That aims to use AI-driven touch and voice input technologies in doctors’ offices to improve medical record input and access. However, founded in 2017, Suki wants to take things a step further with machine learning that essentially adapts to individual doctors and healthcare professionals. The company says that its own solution will integrate with existing electronic records and claims that physicians who take advantage of Suki have cut their note-taking time in half. What’s more, the company is centralizing efforts away from touch-based inputs and directly toward voice and speech recognition advances to ensure that those who use Suki can work completely hands-free.
Impact: Of course, that doesn’t mean there aren’t still challenges to be overcome. Solutions-driven organizations like Suki are currently helping to define what it means to incorporate AI in a healthcare environment in a way that is both useful and compliant with laws and regulations such as HIPAA. In fact, one of Suki’s next goals is to create a variant that’s not integrated with electronic medical records so that it can be used by medical students while maintaining HIPAA compliance. None of that is going to happen overnight but Suki seems to represent at least a solid step forward for the technology.