Suki Assistant

So today we’re chatting about Suki and how it’s used at your company. Before we jump into that, could you give a brief overview of the company and your role there?

We are a primary care provider under the concierge model. Our patients pay a membership fee for non-covered clinical services, and we have other value-added services around health and wellness as well. We are in four states with about 32 providers. I’m the Chief Operating Officer; I joined as the Chief Technology Officer and then took on the operations role after the first three or four years.

What was the primary problem you were looking to solve with a tool like Suki? What functionality were you looking for?

Eight or nine years ago, we implemented athenahealth, at that point we began using Entrada for dictation. At that time there weren’t many offerings on the marketplace. We used Entrada for several years, but after they were acquired by NextGen we started to see feature drift between EMRs. At that point we discovered iScribe and migrated from Entrada to iScribe. We stayed with iScribe for several years, but for several of our providers that created very long notes we were having to send their dictation through the editing process and that was rather costly.

Both products (Suki and iScribe) have/had two main modes: one was basically a cloud-based dictation, which would do voice-to-text into whichever text box you had highlighted on the computer, and the other interfaced with the EMR to pull up a patient note and dictate directly into the encounter. From a cost perspective, iScribe became prohibitively expensive for our more verbose physicians. This expense was due to the editing option where a person, on the iScribe side, would go through the notes after the voice-to-text process and clean them up, which could get extremely expensive, since they charged on a per line basis. We ended up spending $400–500 per month in editing fees for some of our physicians. At the time Suki bundled their enhanced review offering with their product, so we were able to get a cleaner note for more of our physicians at a much lower price.

In addition, iScribe’s review process took about a day to turn around, which became a bit of a choke point for some of our physicians who liked to close their notes out by the end of the day. Suki was able to return their enhanced reviews in a couple hours, which we were pretty pleased by.

Over time we’ve been able to take advantage of additional functionality in the product as well, such as using templates in encounter plans and macros to speed up the documentation process.

I think at the start the functionality for the tools we tried was about at parity, but Suki has evolved more quickly than some of the other products we looked at.