‘Suki, this patient needs a follow up’: AI start-up backed by Salesforce’s CEO Marc Benioff is trying to build an Alexa for doctors in US
The hope is to alleviate some of the burnout doctors feel and free up more time to be with patients
By Lydia Ramsey
Artificial intelligence startup Suki wants to bring an Alexa-like assistant into the doctor’s office.
The company, which officially launched on Tuesday, has raised US$20 million to date from investors including Venrock, First Round, Social Capital, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.
Suki’s goal is to help eliminate doctor burnout. More than half of doctors in the US experience burnout, a rate that’s twice as high as the average American worker. That can have a lot to do with the number of patients and the amount of paperwork that needs to be recorded about each patient. To alleviate that, practices will often hire medical scribes to record that information.
Suki wants to replace that service with an AI-powered voice assistant: In the same way you can tell Amazon’s Alexa to play a Spotify playlist or set a timer while cooking, the team at Suki aims to make a voice assistant that for doctors.
The virtual assistant, called Suki, wakes up at the sound of its name through a phone or desktop application. That way, a doctor can say “Suki, this patient needs a follow up appointment,” and the tool can help coordinate that, CEO Punit Soni, a former Google and Motorola executive, told Business Insider.
The technology is in pilot programmes California and Georgia, including internal medicine, orthopedics, and plastic surgery practices.