On Wednesday, 1842 Fund launched a new startup developing an ambient AI care coordination platform meant to fix inefficiencies in patient handoffs. The startup, called Suvi Health, records and organizes bedside conversations between patients and their care team so that patients can revisit them and share them with family.
The 1842 Fund is an incubator and venture capital fund backed by the University of Notre Dame and managed by Alloy Partners. Suvi grew out of a year-long collaboration between the venture studio, Notre Dame and Mayo Clinic to tackle hospitals’ length-of-stay problem, particularly for chronic conditions like heart failure, said CEO Kelly Benning.
The pitch is making recording effortless for both providers and patients. Most ambient AI scribes require a clinician to manually start and stop a recording — but when a patient downloads Suvi’s app on their phone or tablet, it detects when a care team member walks in and automatically starts recording and then stops once they leave.
Benning noted the platform captures patients’ conversations with the whole care team — doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, nutritionists, pharmacists and anyone else who interacts with the patient.
The platform typically captures about 17 conversations a day for a heart failure patient, she said. Those conversations are then distilled into a task list shared between patients and their provider. This gives patients a clearer picture of what they have been asked to do and why, such as using a spirometer or following a low-sodium diet, Benning explained.
“In the past, it’s been really hard for patients to act upon these things when they only remember less than 20% of the conversations they have while in the hospital,” she remarked. “This way, they will understand the priority of those tasks that are assigned to them to help lead to their potential for discharge.”
The app also lets patients loop in family members who live far away — Benning pointed to an adult child 2,000 miles from a hospitalized parent being able to follow bedside conversations in near real time.
Suvi plans to launch a four-month pilot with Mayo Clinic in September. Benning said it will be focused on heart failure patients admitted through cardiology or internal medicine, with hundreds of providers expected to use the platform. She added that the pilot will also extend into the emergency department, since cardiologists frequently see heart failure patients there before or during admission.
The startup expects to report back on outcomes once the pilot concludes at the end of the year.
Benning noted that Suvi spent months collaborating with Mayo’s clinical and legal teams on two fronts: routing the right information to the right people without disrupting existing workflows, and ensuring the platform meets patient privacy and consent standards.
This due diligence is a solid foundation to build on — but Suvi still enters a crowded field of ambient AI scribes that hospitals have increasingly adopted to ease documentation burdens and clinician burnout. However, Benning pointed out that most existing tools are built for provider use rather than patient-facing transparency. They’re also not typically deployed in inpatient hospital rooms, like Suvi is designed to operate.
Suvi is selling its product to health systems, so its business success depends on its ability to improve metrics for hospitals — specifically, shortening patients’ length of stay.
Whether Suvi’s family sharing and task list features translate into shorter hospital stays will depend on results from the pilot.
Photo: Cavan Images, Getty Images
