HIMSS25: Suki’s CEO on its progression in health technology

LAS VEGAS – Punit Singh Soni, founder and CEO of Suki, maker of an AI-backed healthcare voice tool, sat down with MobiHealthNews at the HIMSS Global Health Conference and Exhibition to discuss the evolution of the company and its experience at the conference.

MobiHealthNews: How are you enjoying HIMSS25?

Punit Singh Soni: This year has been insane, and I was reflecting on it last night. Is it the state of the company? Is it the state of the sector? Every fourth company [in the exhibit hall] looks like an ambient AI company right now.

At HIMSS, it feels like 2018 and ’19, when it used to be berzerk. But because of that, we’ve been packed. Four or five years ago, my company had 20 people in it. We brought 20 people here, and they’re packed. They just have no time. We probably need to get a few more people in for the platform side of things because everything is so busy right now. So, yes, it’s quite extraordinary, really, but, you know, very worth it. Very worth it.

MHN: Suki has grown a lot over the last year alone. Are there certain things you have been most excited about over the previous year that you were not expecting to happen for the company?

Soni: In 2023, we quadrupled our revenue. In ’24, we tripled on top of that. This year, we will triple again. And if that repeats itself for another year or two, you are probably looking at one of the largest companies in this space–in this space defined as healthcare tech not ambient. 

So, one, you can build as much product in life as you want to; you cannot build market. Over the last two years, the market has shown up, and everybody is interested in the space; they’re interested in the solution, and they want to get to know how to use the assistant in health systems. 

Actually, the part that’s insane for us is all these companies, other companies, coming to us and saying, “Can we use your AI platform, incorporate it into our product, and build our own experiences?” That has been insane, and if you imagine that if others want to incorporate pieces of Suki into their product, then the entire floor here is potentially a target market. Everybody can be. So, that has been a big surprise. 

Second, I would say for me personally, the focus has shifted from, hey, let’s just win deals and sign things and keep scaling to service. Can I actually serve these people with quality? Will they love me for what I have built? Is my NPS [net promoter score] going to be high enough? How are my people treating the customers? How do users think about Suki? What are the infrastructure, privacy, data and compliance requirements, and are they scaling as we are actually scaling as a company?  

So, honestly, I tell my team that if somebody asks about competition, I usually say the biggest competition I have is me. Can I serve myself? Can I do a good job myself? The biggest challenge is always you, yourself. And I would say that’s the biggest insight, which is our mentality is shifting as a company from how do we go out and convince the world that they need to work with us to how can we actually do a good job serving the people who have signed up with us?

MHN: There are many people at the top and then there are the boots on the ground. Sometimes, what the people at the top say will happen in healthcare does not trickle down to benefit providers and patients.

Soni: Absolutely. I mean, to be honest, what is it about? What is going to happen? I was lucky enough to be at Google for about a decade before this. The first four or five years of building this company were crickets. Nobody was paying attention. 

I remember I had a small kiosk, you know, those where just one person can stand in HIMSS for multiple years and walking with a bag in hand because you do not have a place to actually put stuff. Then you actually scale up, and the difference between this and that, honestly, is just a bunch of like opportunistic hard work and luck. 

If you lose sight of who you are serving…Suki Assistant is deployed to doctors. Doctors use it for clinical documentation, for coding, for patient summarization, things like that. When they use that, they feel less cognitive burden, which means they focus on the patient. 

So that means the doctor and patient can have a really great interaction. If that doesn’t work out, what is the point of building the company? Who cares? I mean, we will do this, and it will be awesome, but a few years later, we are gone and forgotten. Maybe I exit, I make some money, somebody makes some money, but it does not really materially change anything. 

I do think you have to keep your focus on what actually matters. And, I mean, there are 100 easier ways to make money than building a company. So, if you are going to just do that, then you have to make sure that it actually changes the lives of the people who are using the product.

MHN: So, you are anticipating growth will continue this year. Do you have any announcements coming up?

Soni: Yeah. I mean, I’m necessarily paranoid about life. I feel nothing can be taken for granted. We are here. The growth should be here. The growth should be here next year, too, but what if it is not here? So, we have to just make sure we keep delivering. 

A few things that are happening right now; we announced the Center of Excellence for Epic in the country is Rush. We announced with them a massive expansion, and it is based on some very important ROI metrics, like being able to see more patients, the documentation quality is higher so people are getting paid better and the satisfaction rates for doctors who are using is higher. The reason this is important is because, honestly, there are like 100 announcements every day about expansion here and there, but under the hood, the reality is what metrics are actually driving it from an ROI perspective? We have been able to validate that with an academic center like Rush.

Number two, the world is going to shift from clinical documentation and coding to an assistant that can also do clinical reasoning and clinical acumen. It can understand the context of the doctor and support them in their clinical activity. For that, the beginning of that is going to be things like, if I came to see you, “Hey, what do I need to know about Jessica? Or what is Jessica’s A1C levels? What medications has she been taking, etc.” But going from there to there is an issue that we’re dealing with with respect to Jessica; what is the latest information?

So, the UpToDate integration that we have just kicked off, which UpToDate and Wolters Kluwer Health announced is a very big part of that.

Finally, we have always felt that the Epic part of this ecosystem has had a perception that somehow certain competitors are more integrated and more favored than us. I think Epic has done a really good job by actually making haiku access available to us now, so that there is actually no perception or otherwise differences between what we do. That is actually going to be really critical for our growth next year because we want Epic Systems to know that we are as integrated as anybody else, if not more, in what we do.