LAS VEGAS—Suki AI has inked a deal with the nation’s largest telehealth platform, Zoom Healthcare, to integrate an AI assistant into Zoom’s telehealth experience.
The deal marks Suki’s largest provider partnership to date.
Suki is not new to the telehealth market—it deployed with Amwell earlier this year—but the capabilities it forecasts for its integration with Zoom far exceed what the company has implemented to date.
Punit Soni, CEO of Suki, plans to incorporate the Suki assistant’s available technology to date, which includes ambient scribing, clinical note generation and suggested ICD-10 billing codes, into Zoom telehealth. But Soni believes that the combination of telehealth and AI will be able to power AI assistive abilities that exceed what can be done in a clinic.
Suki was selected by Zoom through a process that included many other healthcare AI companies. While Zoom’s general purpose video conferencing platform has an AI scribe, it will use Suki’s technology to develop a healthcare assistant because of its knowledge of the highly regulated industry, executives said.
Zoom Healthcare currently has a 36% share of the telehealth platform market, per Definitive Healthcare's January 2024 report. Zoom is used by many of the nation’s largest health systems, hundreds of thousands of doctors and millions of patients.
Soni said the opportunity will launch Suki far beyond its current reach.
“From sheer footprint of being able to provide access to these AI assistants, to such a large swath of people, nothing comes close, nothing in the market,” Soni said.
Soni envisions that the telehealth AI assistant won’t just document clinical notes and pull ICD codes for billing but that it will be able to surface specific clinical information about a patient in real time while the provider is using Zoom.
“Because video is a continuous stream of data, you can do all sorts of real time things on top of that video that will make it even more interesting,” Soni said. “And so all the things we do in person, clinical documentation, coding, patient summarization, question and answers, and all these various skills that we are actually launching, they will be embedded in a very deep, real-time way into the telehealth interface and that would build basically a completely new way of telehealth.”
The telehealth AI assistant has not yet been built, and Soni expects the build to take up most of his time for the foreseeable future.
“Telehealth becomes, in many ways, the center point, the hub of a lot of interactions,” Soni said. “You can start your conversation with the health system through a telehealth visit. You can go in and actually fill in a bunch of things through these things. Doctors and patients, nurses and staff might be talking to each other through these video interfaces. Then you might end up actually seeing somebody in person doing stuff. So this is also their strategy around how to rethink all of that from an AI perspective.”
The partnership with Zoom Healthcare will push Suki to build its assistant for a virtual care world. Soni’s vision for the company extends even further. In the future, he hopes that the Suki platform can be sold to healthcare entities for them to customize.
“If I want to actually be the AI engine of healthcare, if I want to build an AI platform that can make healthcare tech assistance invisible, I have to be everywhere, and I have to be able to power other experiences and let them actually decide how they want to use it,” Soni said.