Health care artificial intelligence company Suki is teaming up with Wolters Kluwer Health to bring evidence-based clinical decision support directly into physicians’ existing workflows—at the point of care.
Today, the two companies are launching Ask, a clinical decision support tool powered by Wolters Kluwer’s UpToDate Expert AI. Available within the Suki for Clinicians application, Ask allows physicians to retrieve patient information and consult medical evidence without switching between applications.
The tool combines UpToDate—the popular medical reference resource used by more than 3 million clinicians worldwide—with the patient-specific context available through Suki’s ambient clinical intelligence platform.
The integration marks the first use of Wolters Kluwer’s UpToDate Expert AI application programming interface (API) by an external technology partner.
Suki founder and CEO Punit Soni told Newsweek that his team seeks out “the best in the market” when they want to “plug in” rather than building capabilities from scratch. UpToDate fit their bill for Ask, with over three decades of experience providing evidence-based clinical guidelines.
“Wolters Kluwer and UpToDate have built trust over decades,” Soni said, “and we believe that’s the gold standard.”
The Ask capability will become available this week across Epic, Oracle Health, athenahealth and MEDITECH for Suki’s more than 400 health system and health tech customers.
How It Works
Consider a 78-year-old patient with hypertension and diabetes who arrives at a physician’s office complaining of dizziness. The physician might want to consult the latest clinical guidance on a potential diagnosis.
Traditionally, Soni said, that could mean searching a separate medical reference platform, reviewing recommendations and manually determining how they apply to the patient’s medications, medical history and other risk factors.
Ask is designed to bring those steps together.
Because Suki can access relevant patient information from the EHR, clinicians can ask for clinical guidance without having to reenter the patient’s history. The system combines that context with information from UpToDate, whose evidence base is maintained by more than 7,600 physician authors, editors and peer reviewers.
Clinicians can also ask straightforward questions about the patient, including their most recent A1C result, current medications or documented allergies.
Questions can be spoken aloud or typed, although responses are currently text-based. The answers remain available in Suki for Clinicians after the encounter and include citations to supporting clinical evidence when drawing on UpToDate, a spokesperson for Suki told Newsweek.
Unlike general-purpose AI models that may generate responses from a broad range of sources, UpToDate says that Expert AI grounds its clinical answers exclusively in the company’s proprietary, physician-reviewed content.
In early evaluations, clinicians preferred responses incorporating Suki-supplied patient context over those without it 83 percent of the time, according to a joint news release shared with Newsweek. The evaluations did not establish whether the integration improves clinical outcomes.
What Health Systems and Clinicians Can Expect
Ask is rolling out to Suki customers, with deployment depending on individual health systems’ preferences, according to the company’s spokesperson. Some organizations will have the feature enabled automatically, while others can request activation.
For health system leaders, however, introducing AI into clinical reasoning requires different considerations than deploying tools that primarily automate documentation.
“Clinical decision support is very high stakes,” Yaw Fellin, senior vice president and general manager of clinical decision support and provider solutions at Wolters Kluwer Health, told Newsweek.
“The Expert AI system will answer questions around high-stakes areas like drug dosing,” he said, emphasizing the importance of governance at the enterprise level when determining how the technology is deployed.
Fellin recommended that health systems start with a proof of concept involving a single specialty or small group of clinicians before scaling the tool across the organization (his standard advice when introducing a new product).
He also said that the physician remains responsible for clinical decisions, including determining whether to follow the AI’s recommendations and what information to include in the patient’s medical record.
Why It Matters
For Wolters Kluwer, the partnership opens another avenue for bringing its clinical content to physicians at the point of care.
“This is now a much more scalable framework for us,” Fellin said, “to partner with other organizations like Suki, where we’re able to embed deeply into workflows.”
The launch is another step in Suki’s broader effort to transform ambient AI from a documentation assistant into a platform supporting clinical and operational work.
After initially focusing on generating clinical notes, Suki expanded into medical coding and revenue cycle management. Ask adds clinical reasoning capabilities, while Soni said the company’s next phase will focus on helping clinicians complete operational tasks.
“Ambient clinical intelligence is not going to be stopping here,” Soni said.