CXO of the Week: Punit Singh Soni, Founder and CEO, Suki

Suki is a technology company that provides AI-powered voice solutions for healthcare. Its mission is to reimagine the healthcare tech stack, making it invisible and assistive to lift the administrative burden from physicians. Its flagship product is Suki Assistant, an AI-powered, voice enabled digital assistant that helps physicians complete documentation and other administrative tasks 76% faster on average.

Punit Soni is the founder and CEO of Suki. He leads a team of physicians, engineers, and technologists creating innovative solutions to lift the administrative burden from doctors. Prior to starting Suki, Punit was the Chief Product Officer of Flipkart, a $15B Indian e-commerce company.

We recently interacted with Punit Singh Soni is the founder and CEO of Suki. He shared his views on how AI voice solutions help the healthcare sector, his entrepreneurial journey, the company’s growth, and much more.

Read below to know more.

Introduction.

Punit Soni is the founder and CEO of Suki, a leading technology company that provides AI-powered voice solutions for healthcare. He leads a team of physicians, engineers, and technologists creating innovative solutions to lift the administrative burden from doctors. Prior to starting Suki, Punit was the Chief Product Officer of Flipkart, a $15B Indian e-commerce company. He also held leadership positions at Google, including VP of Product for Motorola; Lead PM for Google+ Mobile and Google Mobile Apps; PM of News, News Archive, and Search. He an MBA from Wharton and a MS/BS in Electrical Engineering.

What is Suki AI and what does it do?

Suki provides AI-powered voice solutions for healthcare. Our mission is to reimagine the healthcare tech stack, making it invisible and assistive so that doctors can focus on what matters - taking care of patients. Our flagship product is Suki Assistant, an AI-powered, voice assistant that helps physicians complete documentation and other tasks 72% faster on average.  Suki Assistant is used by clinicians across 30+ specialties.

We also offer our proprietary voice platform, Suki Speech Platform, to partners who want to create voice interfaces for their solutions. Suki Speech Platform uses the latest in natural language processing and machine learning to provide flexible and accurate voice experiences, and is used by leading companies in clinical communications, EMRs, and medical devices.

How is the idea of suki created?

The idea occurred to Punit when he was shadowing doctors at Harvard Medical School. Punit sat in on an appointment a family medicine physician had with an army veteran with multiple comorbidities - diabetes, PTSD, and several other issues. There was a social worker in the room, there was a nurse, there was the patient, and Punit noticed that among all these people, the most distracted person was the doctor.  The doctors was juggling a variety of tasks: listening to the patient,  documenting the discussion, ordering medications and tests. This experience planted the seed of an idea that ultimately became  Suki Assistant.

Today, doctors are overburdened with a host of clinical and administrative tasks that they are responsible for to advance the care of the patient. Voice assistants can help shoulder the burden of some of these tasks, including documentation, coding, and real time data queries.  Doctors can speak naturally to complete these tasks quickly and accurately, so they can focus their time and attention on their patients.

How do AI voice solutions help the healthcare sector, especially during this pandemic?

The pandemic has exacerbated the physician burnout crisis that has been ongoing for years.  One of the main contributors to burnout is the large amount of administrative work doctors are responsible for.  AI voice solutions can help streamline some of the most tedious tasks and give time back to busy doctors.  Voice is an especially effective modality because it’s a natural and fast way to exchange information, so voice-based solutions are more intuitive to use while also delivering significant time savings.  For example, with Suki Assistant, physicians can speak their medical decision making process to create a patient note 72% faster on average.  Physicians tell us their notes are also higher quality because it’s easy to capture more detail by voice.  This richer documentation helps not only improve patient care but can also support better reimbursement levels - a win for all parties: the patient, the physician, and the practice.

What are Suki’s offerings in terms of reduced documentation, cutting edge technology and sustainability?

The goal is for Suki Assistant to help physicians with a wide variety of tasks.  Its current capabilities cover some of the most pressing pain points: clinical documentation, diagnosis coding, retrieving patient information from the EHR.  We continuously add to Suki’s feature set by expanding the types of tasks it can tackle and plan to add new skills like recommending billing codes and helping to manage the patient inbox.  A key guiding principle in building Suki is making it as intuitive as possible.  Our investments in NLP/NLU and ML enable us to create natural, simple, and accurate voice experiences to handle these complicated tasks so physicians can concentrate on patient care.

Recent research shows physicians spend two hours on clerical tasks for every hour of patient care, resulting in high levels of physician burnout and dissatisfaction with practice.  And with Suki, administrative work can be streamlined, saving physicians significant time - 72% on average, based on recent study conducted by the American Academy of Family Physicians.  With more time back in the day, Suki users report higher rates of satisfaction with their practice, lower levels of burnout, and more time to spend on patient care or personal interests.

What is your roadmap for India and the new India centre?

India is an exciting market considering the digitization of the industry that is currently underway, starting with the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission which intends to roll out a digital health record for each Indian citizen.  The level of tech talent in the country is world-class.  Suki’s centre of excellence in Bangalore aims to build a engineering and operations hub that will be the engine of innovation for the company. We want to help establish India as a global hub for solving the biggest and most complex healthcare challenges faced by the world today. We’re using cutting edge ML and NLP/NLU techniques to do so, and we’ve already built an exceptional team in India working on these exciting projects. While we do not operate commercially in India today, we expect it to be a key market for us as we expand globally.

What are the advantages of going digital?

Technology will be a significant lever for health systems to increase efficiency and capture value.  Healthcare operates on famously thin margins, and the pandemic has increased the financial pressure these organizations face.  Digital tools like Suki help physicians save time, and as a result, physicians can spend more time with patients or even see more patients.  That results in increased revenue for the health system.  Physicians also feel less burnt out, reducing the risk of attrition, which helps health systems avoid the very signficant costs of recruitment. Finally, technology solutions are scalable, so health systems can deploy these tools relatively quickly across specialties, which means they can capture the value the technologies provide much more quickly.

Who is your target audience in the AI voice solution?

Suki aspires to help every doctor, clinician, practice, and health system across the world with their administrative burden. We are rapidly expanding our user base and are focused on growing our footprint.  We currently support physicians across 30+ specialties and are adding new users and customers every day.  We are so gratified when we hear from our users how Suki has helped them: some have been able to stay in practice longer, some tell us they now have time to develop deeper relationships with their patients, some appreciate the time they now have to spend on personal interests.  The impact we have gives us the motivation to continue making progress in this industry that can be quite difficult, so we can ultimately reach our goal of helping every clinician.

What are your future plans? How do you see Suki AI in the next five years?

The Indian startup ecosystem is brimming with excellent talent. We are very excited to provide a global platform to India’s tech talent to build for the future of health systems and emerge as the torchbearer of the still nascent SaaS based healthcare technology space in the country. Our goal is to help establish India as a global hub for solving the biggest and most complex healthcare challenges faced by the world.

With world-class mentors and industry professionals, we are looking for great tech talent who can learn and build at a global scale.  As the industry digitizes through government initiatives like Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission, we believe Suki will be able to add tremendous value in the lives of doctors and healthcare professionals in India. We expect India to be a significant market for us in the coming years.