Rx.Health is adding a suite of tools to prevent physician burnout. How do you keep physicians from being overwhelmed by a mountain of paperwork? Give them a voice assistant, similar to Amazon's Alexa or Apple's Siri. That's the thinking behind Suki, a Redwood City-based startup that recently struck a partnership with Mount Sinai Health System spinoff Rx.Health. Rx.Health curates digital tools for doctors, allowing them to prescribe digital therapeutics and care plans from electronic health record systems.

So much of a physician's workload includes repetitive, tedious tasks involved in researching diagnoses and analyzing patient data and imaging. On top of increasingly demanding administrative and regulatory burdens and electronic health records (EHR) hassles, it's no wonder physicians are burning out in record numbers. Experts in artificial intelligence (AI)--a form of machine learning in which computers can be trained to recognize patterns in large swaths of data--are hopeful that AI will be a key part of reducing physicians burdens and saving them time and energy. "We live in an age where a lot more data can be generated than a physician can really analyze," says Mark Lambrecht, PhD, director of the global health and life sciences department at SAS, a North-Carolina based analytics company that offers solutions to healthcare providers and payers. He believes that AI can step in to help.