Health technology company WellSky is partnering with Suki to integrate its ambient artificial intelligence scribe into the company's specialty care electronic health record.
WellSky provides technology to post-acute care providers along with community health, home health and hospice organizations and government agencies, serving more than 20,000 providers. The company will roll out the AI-powered ambient listening feature, embedded in its specialty EHR, across behavioral health, long-term acute care and rehabilitation settings.
For Suki, the partnership with WellSky builds on its strategy of integrating its AI technology with other tech partners, which expands its reach into broad areas of the healthcare market. Through its Suki for Partners approach, the ambient clinical intelligence company embeds AI capabilities into other companies' applications.
Suki worked with Zoom to level up its telehealth offerings with AI-backed clinical documentation features and also collaborated with AvaSure to integrate AI documentation tools into the company's virtual care solutions for nurses, as examples. Athenahealth also works with Suki to provide clinicians with AI ambient scribe tools.
Suki's ambient intelligence layer "serves as the AI infrastructure that partners can leverage to bring advanced capabilities to their users, driving greater efficiency, interoperability, and innovation," said Punit Soni, CEO and founder of Suki.
With the ambient listening tool embedded in WellSky's specialty care EHR, clinicians can speak naturally during patient visits while the technology listens in the background, automatically generating structured notes and AI-powered summaries for review and sign-off, according to the company. This eliminates the need for manual data entry and voice dictation, streamlining workflows and helping clinicians create thorough and reliable documentation.
"One of the real benefits of Suki is that they offer a strong, integrated solution. They offer a software development kit which allows organizations like us to deeply integrate their capabilities into our capabilities, which really creates a seamless experience for the end user," Amy Shellhart, Wellsky's chief solutions officer, told Fierce Healthcare.
"We believe that the best use of AI is when it's enabled directly within the clinicians workflow. There are a lot of partnerships where people say, 'We were working with this third-party AI company, but it requires the clinicians to leave their primary workflow, go do something, and then come back.' Suki really allowed us to integrate their capabilities directly in so that it just feels like one workflow for the clinician."
She added, "By embedding these capabilities, we'll be able to serve all of our post-acute facility markets, which which includes behavioral health, rehab and long-term care."
The company is in the early stages of rollout to clinicians in skilled nursing and behavioral health facilities, she noted.
While clinicians in different care settings have unique workflows and documentation requirements, the need to reduce administrative burden is nearly universal for all providers.
"You have a clinician who spends a good portion of their time on documentation, often not interacting face-to-face, having a real dialog, connecting on care that's being delivered. We have that demand in post-acute care as well," Shellhart said. "You've got clinicians who are coming into a patient's room, and in the case of skilled nursing, and they're over there on the laptop. They really want to interact with the patient. What we're seeing is this is allowing them to capture those really important clinical aspects that are occurring during that care delivery process, but having that face-to-face and actually getting very accurate capturing of that, but then they can go back and validate it."
Preliminary testing shows users using WellSky Ambient Listening capabilities enabled by Suki can reduce documentation time by 41% per clinical note and after-hours work by 37%. By enabling more patient encounters through reduced administrative burden, providers could unlock up to $1,688 in additional incremental monthly revenue per user, according to the organizations.
KVC Health Systems, which provides mental health, child welfare, and health and human services, is an early adopter of the solution. “WellSky Ambient Listening is proving to be a meaningful time saver for our clinicians,” said Erik Nyberg, executive vice president of technology at KVC Health Systems. “It’s helping reduce the documentation burden and allows our team to spend more time with patients. What WellSky is working on has the potential to save significant amounts of time and improve care at the same time."
Ambient documentation is just one area Suki focuses on, Soni told Fierce Healthcare. The company also is building out capabilities for assisted revenue cycle, clinical reasoning and clinical operations.
"We have a belief that ambient clinical intelligence is going to be in every single health system in the world, and every single healthcare tech company in the world will need to integrate it. So, the conversations that are probably happening everywhere, if you're a healthcare company, are 'Do I build it? Do I partner with somebody, and who do I partner with?'" Soni said.
Suki is building this ambient clinical intelligence through its Suki for Clinicians app and its Suki for Partners offering, he said.
"The idea is that the same capabilities that make up the Suki for Clinicians app, we should be able to expose those capabilities to our partners so they can incorporate ambient clinical intelligence into their products," Suni said, noting that the company sees big opportunities with EHR companies.
"We want EHRs to basically be able to embed this ambient clinical intelligence into their platform directly," he said.
Citing WellSky as an example of a strong tech partner, Soni said, "We work with people who really know the space they operate in so therefore we don't have to go direct to those users. We can work with these world-class, successful companies and let them build stuff."
"It's a win-win for us, because it scales ambient clinical intelligence throughout the ecosystem, and they get the benefit of the world-class technology that we have built and that we have learned by building Suki for Clinicians. They can do what they do best, which is build a post-acute solution. We can help power the ACI," he noted.
Founded in 2017, Suki has been rapidly growing as it inks more partnerships with health systems, health tech companies and EHR solutions. Its ambient solution can be used across 100 medical specialties and 81 different languages. The company works with more than 400 health systems and other partners.
WellSky is moving forward to build out its AI capabilities for clinicians. Earlier this month, it unveiled AI capabilities embedded in its flagship EHR for home health providers. The WellSky Scribe tool provides ambient listening and transcription features to support faster, more complete documentation in the EHR workflow.
As part of an expanded partnership with Google Cloud, WellSky plans to integrate Google’s latest Gemini multimodal AI models and federated learning into its technology and develop new AI tools for hospices and other post-acute care providers.
WellSky is focused on using AI for ambient listening as well as medical information extraction, Shellhart said. In January, the company rolled out its AI-powered extraction tool for home heath providers that compiles patient medication information from various sources, like referral documents, handwritten medication lists and medication label photos, and populates the data into the EHR.
"We saw reductions of 60% to 70% in the time it was taking to set up the medication profile for the patient as they were starting home health delivery care," she said.