Suki is creating a new category in the health-tech space: the digital assistant. Our product will be the voice user interface for healthcare. Currently, doctors use electronic health record systems to take notes on patient encounters. This is a digital version of the paper charts that you may have seen in your doctor's office or on TV. These systems can be hard to navigate and time-consuming to manage.

It's no secret that healthcare costs have risen faster than inflation for decades. Some experts estimate that healthcare will account for over 20% of the US GDP by 2025. Meanwhile, doctors are working harder than ever before to treat patients as the U.S. physician shortage continues to grow. Many medical professionals have their schedules packed so tightly that much of the human element which motivated their pursuit of medicine in the first place is reduced. In healthcare, artificial intelligence (AI) can seem intimidating.

It's no secret that healthcare costs have risen faster than inflation for decades. Some experts estimate that healthcare will account for over 20% of the US GDP by 2025. Meanwhile, doctors are working harder than ever before to treat patients as the U.S. physician shortage continues to grow. Many medical professionals have their schedules packed so tightly that much of the human element which motivated their pursuit of medicine in the first place is reduced. In healthcare, artificial intelligence (AI) can seem intimidating.

Clinical voice assistant developer Suki has created a new voice platform with improved artificial intelligence. The Suki Speech Service, referred to by the company as S3, makes Suki's voice assistant faster, more accurate, and flexible enough that it could be used by professionals outside of the healthcare sector. Suki's current voice assistant is built to reduce the amount of time and energy doctors spend on administrative tasks and records. The voice assistant records, transcribes, and organizes a doctor's conversations with a patients and any notes on the case. Suki can then automatically complete the data entry necessary for Electronic Health Records (EHR).

For doctors that are exhausted from long hours typing up patient medical records, it could be game-changing, says Punit Soni, founder and CEO of Suki AI, a virtual assistant app for clinicians. The startup just raised a $20 million Series B round from Flare Capital Partners, First Round Capital, and Venrock, doubling its total funding to $40 million since its 2017 launch. The premise of Suki AI is simple: It's Alexa for doctors. Similar to how people can order Amazon's voice-enabled digital assistant to set a reminder or tell them their schedule, doctors can use Suki to take notes during patient appointments and those notes will automatically fill out electronic health records (EHRs). That's increasingly important as doctors spend more time logging data and less face time with patients.

Amazon ( NASDAQ: AMZN) has introduced a new healthcare application which interfaces with electronic health records and significantly improves patient and clinician interaction. Amazon Transcribe Medical digitally converts speech ( patient and medical professional conversations) via a microphone feed to text for inclusion within clinical documentation and other healthcare data records. Amazon Transcribe Medical can accurately process spoken dialogue plus medical and pharmacological descriptions and clinical terminology aligned with medical professional and patient discussions. The application can populate electronic health records ( EHR) that is also referred to as electronic medical record ( EMR) which healthcare professionals and their provider organizations use to record and manage patient data. In healthcare and an array of other industries, advances in voice recognition and transcription technology are widely welcomed and highly anticipated.

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.

Doctors practice medicine to deliver care, not do data entry. Yet in the era of electronic medical records (EMRs), for every hour spent with a patient, physicians spend nearly two hours on paperwork. What if technology could take care of the paperwork for us? Record-keeping systems in health care were built for back-office functions, not bedside medicine. Most EMR vendors started out building products to collect payments and schedule appointments.

A new artificial-intelligence (AI) engine developed by Oregon Health and Science University can detect the cause of blindness in babies more accurately than doctors, in a step that promises automation of tasks often held back by shortage of qualified professionals. By reading images of eyes, the AI engine was able to diagnose the causes of blindness in babies with 91% accuracy, said the report by news agency IANS. For comparison, a team of doctors was only 82% accurate. "There's a huge shortage of ophthalmologists trained and willing to diagnose retinopathy of prematurity (RoP). This creates enormous gaps in care, even in the US, and sadly leads to many children around the world going undiagnosed," said co-lead researcher Michael Chiang at Oregon Health and Science University in the report.

When trying to figure out what to do after an extensive career at Google, Motorola, and Flipkart, Punit Soni decided to spend a lot of time sitting in doctors' offices to figure out what to do next. It was there that Soni said he figured out one of the most annoying pain points for doctors in any office: writing down notes and documentation. That's why he decided to start Suki -- previously Robin AI -- to create a way for doctors to simply start talking aloud to take notes when working with patients, rather than having to put everything into a medical record system, or even writing those notes down by hand. That seemed like the lowest hanging fruit, offering an opportunity to make it easier for doctors that see dozens of patients to make their lives significantly easier, he said. "We decided we had found a powerful constituency who were burning out because of just documentation," Soni said.