Health-care artificial intelligence startup Suki on Wednesday announced a new collaboration with Google Cloud as part of its push to expand beyond clinical documentation.
Through the partnership, Suki is building patient summary and Q&A features using Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform, which allows developers to train, tune and deploy different AI models and applications.
Suki’s flagship product, called Suki Assistant, allows doctors to record their visits with patients and automatically turn them into clinical notes, helping physicians avoid the headache of manually writing out all of that information.
The new features with Google Cloud will allow Suki to provide clinicians with more assistive tech as they provide care to patients, the startup said.
It is the next frontier for the seven-year-old company.
“We were never really building a clinical documentation tool only, it was supposed to be an assistant,” Punit Soni, the founder and CEO of Suki, told CNBC. “An assistant can help you with documentation, but it can also start doing other things.”
Doctors will be able to use Suki’s platform, for instance, to quickly ask questions and pull up relevant information about a patient’s medical history, said Soni, who previously spent several years as an employee at Google.
Suki’s new summary feature will allow clinicians to read up on a patient’s basic biographical information, visit history and reason for coming in with just one click. The summary shows details such as the patient’s age, chronic conditions, past prescriptions and other problems, such as “low back pain.”
Pulling together all of that data automatically could help save doctors the 15 to 30 minutes they spend each time they search for it themselves, Soni said.
If clinicians have more specific questions about a patient, they can click Suki’s Q&A button to type in their queries. They can submit prompts such as, “Show me his A1C over the last three months as a graph,” “What vaccines did the patient take?” or “When was his last electrocardiogram?”
Suki’s patient summarization feature is available to a select group of clinicians starting Wednesday, with general availability coming early next year, the company said. The new Q&A feature will also be generally available early next year.
The initial version of Suki’s Q&A feature will be equipped to answer questions based on individual patient data, but the company said it plans to broaden the scope eventually. Suki’s summarization and Q&A features will not come at an additional cost to its customers.
“To me, this is actually a larger trend of the AI design, or AI-ification, of health care,” Soni said.
Suki’s technology is used by 350 health systems and clinics in the U.S., and the startup tripled its client base this year, the company said. The company’s new offerings could help it stand out within a fiercely competitive market.
Administrative workloads are a major cause of burnout for health-care workers across the U.S., which means executives in the industry are eager for solutions. Clinicians spend nearly 28 hours a week on administrative tasks, including almost nine hours on documentation alone, according to a study published by Google Cloud in October.
As a result, documentation tools that claim to help reduce these workloads, such as Suki’s, have exploded in popularity this year, and investors are paying attention.
Suki closed a $70 million funding round in October, and rival startup Abridge announced a $150 million funding round in February. Microsoft’s subsidiary Nuance Communications, which Microsoft acquired for $16 billion in 2021, also offers a popular AI documentation tool for doctors.
“Just like the internet happened, AI is also happening now,” Soni said.
A Boeing 767-332(ER) from Delta Air Lines takes off from Barcelona El Prat Airport in Barcelona, Spain, on October 8, 2024.
Joan Valls | Nurphoto | Getty Images
CrowdStrike moved Monday evening to dismiss Delta Air Lines’ lawsuit around the July cybersecurity outage that led to canceled flights and stranded passengers, arguing that the airline’s litigation was an attempt to circumvent the contract between the two companies.
The agreement between CrowdStrike and Delta includes a clause limiting CrowdStrike’s liability and a cap on damages, which the cybersecurity provider says Delta is now trying to skirt. CrowdStrike also argued in its filing that Georgia law prevents Delta from converting a breach of contract into tort claims.
“As an initial matter, Georgia’s economic loss rule specifically precludes Delta’s efforts to recover through tort claims the economic damages it claims to have suffered,” CrowdStrike wrote.
Delta said the July cybersecurity outage cost the company more than $500 million in canceled flights, refunds and passenger accommodations. It is seeking to recoup those costs from CrowdStrike through the suit. But the damage done to Delta’s reputation as a premium carrier can’t yet be quantified, nor has the impact of a Department of Transportation investigation into Delta over the outage.
Delta continues to rely on CrowdStrike services following the outage, likely because it is extremely difficult to change cybersecurity providers in systems as large and complicated as Delta’s.
Still, CrowdStrike said it moved quickly to try and help Delta — offers the cybersecurity company says were rebuffed. “We are good for now,” one message from a Delta executive cited by CrowdStrike read. The cybersecurity company said its executives were in close contact on the day of the outage.
“Delta repeatedly rebuffed any assistance from CrowdStrike or its partners,” CrowdStrike wrote.
CrowdStrike further argues that Delta’s own practices and systems led to the widespread delays and cancellations, unlike other industry peers who recovered much more quickly from the outage.
“Delta was an outlier. Although Delta acknowledges that it took just hours—not days—for Delta employees to” remediate the outage, CrowdStrike wrote in its filing, “cancellations far exceeded the flight disruptions its peer airlines experienced.”
The cybersecurity company’s stock took a sharp hit after the outage, plunging 44%. It’s since largely recovered from those losses, posting strong quarterly results even after lowering its guidance due to the incident. CrowdStrike has been helped by the relative stickiness of its products, especially at large enterprises.
A Delta spokesperson was not immediately available for comment.
Dexcom on Tuesday announced an artificial intelligence feature for its Stelo continuous glucose monitor that gives users a personalized look into how meals, sleep and activity impact their glucose levels. It’s the first iteration of a new generative AI platform that the company has been building with Google Cloud.
Stelo is an over-the-counter CGM that pokes through the skin to measure real-time blood sugar levels. The sensor launched in August and can be used by any adult who doesn’t take insulin.
The report reflects Dexcom’s effort to make Stelo more personalized and engaging for consumers as it works to penetrate a new market.
“The No. 1 feedback we get is users want to see more,” Jake Leach, chief operating officer at Dexcom, told CNBC in an interview. “They’re making an investment and wearing the product, and they want to be able to take the most advantage of all the data that they’re generating.”
Dexcom is using Google’s Gemini models and its Vertex AI platform as the foundation for its new AI offering. Vertex AI allows developers to build applications that synthesize different types of data, which can be notoriously challenging in health care.
Leach said Dexcom is also exploring how its generative AI platform can be used across its other CGM products, but the company is proceeding extra carefully since patients rely on them to prevent medical emergencies.
“It really felt like Stelo was the right place to do this for the first time,” he said.
An existing insights report has already been available to users within the Stelo app, but it followed a more standard template format each week. Dexcom believes the AI-generated report will be more valuable to users since it’s personalized, Leach said.
If there’s a week where a user is not moving enough after meals, for instance, the report would include relevant tips and educational materials to help.
Stelo’s AI reports don’t give users medical advice, though Dexcom has been using an AI framework from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to help guide the feature’s development, Leach said. The FDA approved Stelo in March.
Eventually, Dexcom wants to use its generative AI platform to deliver real-time feedback to users instead of just weekly reports. The company is also exploring how the technology could act as a predictive indicator for potential problems, much like a check engine light on a car.
“It gives you a sense for what could be going on, and recommendations of where you might want to go to seek more advice,” Chris Sakalosky, vice president of strategic industries for Google Cloud, told CNBC in an interview.
Dexcom’s updated weekly report began rolling out to Stelo users this week.
Close-up of Databricks company logo on building facade, Rincon Hill, San Francisco, June 7, 2024.
Smith Collection/ gado | Archive Photos | Getty Images
Databricks, one of the most valuable privately held companies, announced a $10 billion financing on Tuesday that values the software maker at $62 billion.
With the money, Databricks will be able to provide liquidity to current and former employees, make acquisitions, and expand overseas, according to a statement. The company’s new valuation is up from $43 billion in 2023. Rival Snowflake was worth about $57 billion at Monday’s close.
Databricks sells software for analyzing and cleaning up data, and it also runs artificial intelligence models for clients. The software is available on the Amazon, Google and Microsoft clouds, which are also competitors.
The company expects to generate positive free cash flow for the first time with a $3 billion revenue run rate in the quarter that ends on Jan. 31, Databricks said. The company’s revenue in the October quarter grew more than 60% year over year.
Investors in the financing, of which it has raised $8.6 billion to date, include Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, GIC, Iconiq Growth, Insight Partners, MGX, Sands Capital, WCM Investment Management and Wellington Management.
Technology investors have been anticipating a Databricks initial public offering for years. They may only have to wait a few more months.
ServiceTitan, a company with software for plumbers and others working in the trades, raised about $625 million in an initial public offering last week, and some investors have predicted that tech IPOs will become more frequent again in 2025 after a relative drought since late 2021.
Databricks did not offer new information about its expectations for an IPO on Tuesday.
“If we were going to go, the earliest would be, let’s say mid next year or something like that,” Ali Ghodsi, Databricks’ co-founder and CEO, said at the Cerebral Valley AI Summit in November.
Late-stage investors with large funds don’t have many options for what to back, Ghodsi said.
“There’s nowhere to put it, really, except maybe Databricks, Stripe or, you know, maybe OpenAI,” Ghodsi said.
Databricks made its fourth appearance on CNBC’s Disruptor 50 list of private companies in 2024.