Suki, a voice-assistive AI and scribe tool, inked a national group purchasing agreement with Premier Inc. The deal could skyrocket Suki to the top of the healthcare AI assistant market.
Healthcare improvement company Premier represents 4,350 hospitals and health systems, more than Suki’s current presence by a factor of 16. Suki founder and CEO Punit Soni said even if a tenth of Premier’s members decide to lean into the group purchasing agreement, Suki would become the largest healthcare AI assistant company.
Premier members, including 300,000 providers, will be able to purchase Suki for a pre-negotiated rate by Premier for the assistive technology. The agreement is also a signifier of Premier’s approval of the product and its benefits over other similar products, which Premier also evaluated during the process, according to the companies.
The purchase agreement “reduces friction” for new health systems to choose Suki’s product.
“All these 4,300 odd health systems, if we can believe that over the next three to five years, all of healthcare is going to be using an AI assistant of some kind, then many of these folks will probably call on the (group purchasing organization), like Premier, which is a very, very large one, and say, what's the best recommendation you have in the space? And Premier will say, well, we have looked at the entire ecosystem, and then we have chosen Suki based on the quality of its products,” Soni said.
Soni likened the uptake of AI products in the healthcare system to the uptake of electronic medical records in the late aughts. For Premier members, he believes Suki will likely become the default AI solution because of the group purchasing agreement.
“The march of AI has come to a point where it's clear what is going to have a fundamental difference in the efficiency, not just in the accuracy and satisfaction of the clinician, but also in terms of the correlation to the actual revenue that's created,” he said. "You will probably save money, you will also generate more money because you are more accurate in terms of what you've actually documented into the note.”
Soni said the evaluation process took nearly six months including demonstrations and customer references. Premier’s pre-negotiated rate will also speed the contracting process between Premier member health systems and Suki from several months to several days, he said.
Suki plans to begin joint marketing campaigns with Premier to spread the word of the partnership to Premier’s members.