- Suki, a company that offers a voice-enabled digital clinical assistant, announced it raised $20 million in Series B funding
Suki — a company that offers a voice-enabled digital clinical assistant — announced it raised $20 million in Series B funding. New investor Flare Capital Partners led the round — which also includes new investors Breyer Capital and Epsilon Health as well as returning investors First Round Capital and Venrock. In connection with the funding round, Flare Capital Partners co-founder and general partner Bill Geary is joining the Suki board of directors.
Over the past couple of years, Suki established itself as a leading solution to physician burnout. Suki uses natural language processing and machine learning to create clinically accurate medical notes and quickly completes administrative tasks like retrieving patient information from the electronic health record (EHR).
This round of funding validates Suki’s effectiveness in helping doctors. And across its user base, the digital assistant has lowered physicians’ average time per note from more than 13 minutes to just over 3 minutes (76%). Studies have shown that for every hour of direct clinical face-time with a patient, physicians spend nearly two additional hours on medical paperwork.
And Suki has also been shown to decrease claims denial rates by up to 19% by generating highly detailed clinical documentation — which is critical to health systems’ and medical groups’ revenue. And high-quality and detailed clinical documentation also supports hierarchical condition category (HCC) coding integrity, which is essential for reimbursement in value-based payment models.
With this round of funding, Suki plans to expand its user base through new and existing partnerships with leading health systems and medical groups across the country. And Suki will advance the artificial intelligence capabilities of its product and add new features that streamline documentation, coding, billing, and other administrative tasks for physicians. Suki is also known for supporting doctors practicing in any clinical setting as well as any specialty, including cardiology, orthopedics, plastic surgery, ophthalmology, pediatrics, and family medicine.
This funding also comes at a time of major growth for the Suki team. The company recently hired digital health sales leader Jallel Harrati as its vice president of sales and Jatin Chhugani as its vice president of engineering. Harrati most recently served as vice president and national sales leader at IBM Watson Health. And Chhugani previously headed up AI teams for Adobe and Flipkart.
Key Quotes:
“It’s clear that physician burnout caused by documentation and administrative burden is a crisis in medicine, which is why we’ve seen such enthusiastic adoption of our technology to date and will continue this momentum with the support of our investors. Suki not only delivers a better physician experience, but also supports high-quality, coordinated care and improved coding and billing through its accurate, detailed medical notes.”
-Punit Soni, founder and CEO of Suki
“Health systems are waking up to the overwhelming burden of physician burnout, from the financial costs of training doctors and medical records manual entry to the increased likelihood of medical errors. At the same time, they recognize that timely, detailed documentation is essential to accurate coding and reimbursement for their services. Suki’s natural language processing empowers physicians to more efficiently create detailed records, and its artificial intelligence contextualizes this clinical and billing data for whoever may need it, including clinician or billing staff.”
-Flare Capital Partners co-founder and general partner Bill Geary
“So much of startup success is driven by the quality, vision, and talent of the team behind the innovation. Suki has attracted leading minds in machine learning and healthcare, a unique combination that has resulted in cutting-edge technology capable of integrating seamlessly into a physician’s daily practice.”
-Jim Breyer, founder and CEO of Breyer Capital.
