Exclusive: Suki, UpToDate Bring AI Clinical Decision Support Into Workflows
Suki's new AI tool surfaces patient-specific clinical guidance, combining medical records with evidence-based info from UpToDate.
Artificial intelligence company Suki is partnering with health information provider Wolters Kluwer Health to integrate UpToDate's clinical decision support tool, Ask, directly into physicians' existing workflows. The new Ask feature, available within Suki for Clinicians application, allows doctors to retrieve patient information and consult medical evidence without switching between applications.
UpToDate's evidence-based guidelines, maintained by over 7,600 physician authors, editors, and peer reviewers, are combined with Suki's patient-specific context to provide relevant clinical guidance. The integration marks the first use of Wolters Kluwer's UpToDate Expert AI API by an external technology partner. Suki founder and CEO Punit Soni explained that the company seeks out the best available tools to plug into existing systems rather than building capabilities from scratch.
UpToDate's reputation for decades of experience in providing evidence-based guidelines made it an ideal choice for Ask. The Ask capability will be rolled out across Epic, Oracle Health, athenahealth, and MEDITECH for Suki's more than 400 health system and health tech customers, including a 78-year-old patient with hypertension and diabetes experiencing dizziness.
Traditionally, physicians would need to search separate medical reference platforms and manually determine how recommendations apply to the patient's medications, medical history, and risk factors. Ask streamlines this process by incorporating relevant patient information from the EHR and providing answers grounded exclusively in UpToDate's proprietary, physician-reviewed content.
In initial evaluations, clinicians preferred responses that included patient context 83 percent of the time, though the study did not measure improvements in clinical outcomes. Wolters Kluwer Health's senior vice president and general manager of clinical decision support, Yaw Fellin, emphasized the importance of governance at the enterprise level when deploying AI technologies and recommended that health systems test the tool with a proof of concept before scaling.
As Suki's broader goal is to transform ambient AI from a documentation assistant to a platform supporting clinical and operational work, Ask represents a significant step forward in enabling clinicians to complete complex reasoning tasks at the point of care.
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