Four more community health centers are implementing Suki AI’s ambient scribe in their clinics, the company announced on Thursday.
Utah Navajo Health System (UNHS), CenterPlace Health, Access Health Louisiana and PrimeCare Health will use Suki AI in their practices. Many community health clinics have been seeking an AI assistant, a Suki representative said, but can’t afford those on the market.
Suki AI is now partnered with nearly a dozen Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) and community health centers (CHCs). Community health centers, FQHCs and rural health clinics (RHCs) often care for complex patients while the practice itself has limited resources.
“These organizations do tend to have extremely complex patients with many different conditions. And so allowing the clinicians to focus on them during the visit rather than on documentation is incredibly important.” Tracy Rentz, senior vice president of customer success and operations at Suki, told Fierce Healthcare.
A provider at the Utah Navajo Health System told Suki she can now see herself continuing to practice medicine because of the assistive capabilities of Suki in clinical note documentation and billing.
“Utah Navajo Health … They are on the Navajo reservation, up in Utah. It's a very remote location. About 95% of their patients are reservation residents and many do have a number of chronic conditions [and] complexity in terms of the conditions that are being treated,” Jennivine Lee Simon, vice president of marketing at Suki, said. “They've been on board with Suki for a number of months and have seen an alleviation of administrative burden and burnout from using Suki.”
At $399 per provider per month, Suki’s list price is already lower than many other solutions, Simon said, but the company can offer discounts to help lower-resourced practices afford the solution.
Simon said some clinics have received grants to pay for Suki.
“What we know from talking to our customers and the FQHCs that are interested in Suki is that they're very much looking for documentation solutions, ambient scribing solutions, but because they do have limited financial resources, some of the other solutions on the market are really out of reach for them,” Simon said. “And so that's a key reason why they select Suki because we have a price point that works within their budgets.”
Suki also helps the cash-strapped clinics get paid more in some cases.
Suki is able to increase a practice’s return on investment by up to nine times in one year, the company claims. By saving time on documentation, Suki can also help increase encounter volume and get more patients into the clinic.
Moreover, providers have said that the ambient documentation tool captures more information from the clinical interaction. Because of ambient listening, providers say they are able to get reimbursement for services that were rendered but not previously documented due to time constraints.