OpenEvidence Reaches 65 Percent of US Doctors as AI Quietly Reshapes Clinical Decision Making

Read Time 6 minutes Tags AI Healthcare OpenEvidence Clinical Decision Support Medical AI HIPAA Your doctor is probably using AI even if they have not told you about it Over the past two years medical providers across America have quietly embraced a new AI tool called OpenEvidence to help them make clinical decisions brush up on medical knowledge and even prepare for their licensing exams The service a sort of chatbot for doctors was used by about 65 percent of US doctors across almost 27 million clinical encounters in April alone the company told NBC News Everyone is using it said Dr Anupam Jena an internal medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and a professor of healthcare policy at Harvard Its growth really has been exponential How OpenEvidence works and why it spread fast One Point of care search engine At its core OpenEvidence is an AI powered medical search engine that combs through vast databases of healthcare research to provide suggestions about clinical decisions or medication options and help highlight the latest evidence from a variety of medical fields The landing page calls it America Official Medical Knowledge Platform and presents users with a search bar which suggests entering queries like alternatives if metformin causes diarrhea or what are the latest advancements in gene therapy for Duchenne muscular dystrophy To answer user questions the system generates a summary of the relevant medical research providing links to the peer reviewed articles or medical guidelines that informed the answer Healthcare providers can access the tool through its website or via a stand alone mobile app Practitioners must sign up for an account and provide their unique healthcare ID number supplied by the US government Once registered the providers can ask unlimited medical questions for free Two Licensing deals with top journals OpenEvidence rapid reference to top tier medical research is its special sauce according to both doctors and the OpenEvidence team The company has inked partnerships and licensing agreements with the world most prestigious medical journals like NEJM and the Journal of the American Medical Association It has also struck agreements with specialized medical organizations like the National Comprehensive Cancer Network and the American Diabetes Association to provide the latest and most relevant treatment guidelines Three Adoption without mandate In an industry where technological change is often forced on hesitant doctors by medical administrators few services have seen such rapid adoption as OpenEvidence We did the hardest thing in the history of American health care said CEO Daniel Nadler We got the majority of American doctors to all voluntarily adopt a single technology platform America financiers are impressed The startup raised 700 million dollars in less than a year and is backed by Sequoia Capital Google Ventures Nvidia Andreessen Horowitz Thrive Capital and more Valued at 1 billion dollars in early 2025 OpenEvidence has surged to a valuation of 12 billion dollars in just over a year Benefits and risks cited by clinicians One Time savings and coverage of gaps Doctors across specialties states and clinic sizes report that OpenEvidence saves time A junior doctor at a New Hampshire hospital said that when he saw a patient potassium value plummet he checked OpenEvidence to make sure it was a normal side effect of a medication and not a new emergency After searching through peer reviewed medical publications OpenEvidence said it was a common side effect and provided several options to restore normal potassium levels Another doctor at the Indian Health Service medical center in rural Pine Ridge South Dakota used it to confirm that a CT scan was preferred to confirm a suspected spine fracture Sixty percent of all the searches are about how to make clinical decisions said Jena who is currently examining 90 million OpenEvidence queries submitted since 2024 as part of a new research project The physicians are asking For this particular patient or with this profile this condition maybe other comorbidities that they have what is the right treatment Two Accuracy and hallucination concerns Some experts worry about potential hallucinations or incomplete answers a lack of rigorous scientific studies on the tool patient impact and the potential for doctors critical thinking and evaluation skills to erode with increased OpenEvidence use and dependence An academic study released in December found that OpenEvidence accurately answered more complex medical questions less than 45 percent of the time That study has not yet been peer reviewed Several doctors noted that OpenEvidence sometimes drew overly strong conclusions from medical studies with small sample sizes though other clinicians noted even the system mistakes tended to err on the side of caution Emergency physician Dr John Rozehnal said that OpenEvidence mistakenly suggested injecting a particular medicine might damage a patient liver even though the risk was very low Weeks later he said OpenEvidence had improved its answer Three Privacy and HIPAA compliance OpenEvidence says it complies with HIPAA through a series of privacy protocols and protections In April of last year the company said that US covered entities can securely input protected health information PHI in accordance with HIPAA privacy and security standards However some health systems are not satisfied with the system overall privacy safeguards For example MaineHealth currently asks its doctors to refrain from entering PHI into OpenEvidence Some doctors use the platform on personal devices entering age sex and previous medical history but refraining from names or other personal identifiers Market and competitive landscape One Shift from UpToDate For years clinicians have turned to UpToDate to get recommendations for proper treatment and clinical decision making UpToDate consists of long form peer reviewed summaries of the latest research tricky to search for doctors with targeted questions about specific scenarios UpToDate has for so long been the dominant place where clinicians wanted to look things up at point of care said Dr Paul Sax of Brigham and Women Hospital But OpenEvidence search feature is far more flexible The process of searching for answers is frictionless UpToDate is now rushing to implement its own AI tool called Expert AI Company spokesperson Suzanne Moran said about 2000 hospitals and health systems have signed up for Expert AI as of April 30 We believe healthcare AI must prioritize patient safety transparency and freedom from advertising Moran added Two Funding and expansion OpenEvidence is part of a growing cottage industry of AI powered medical tools from AI scribes that record and transcribe doctors speech during patient appointments to competitors like Doximity or iatroX A recent survey by the American Medical Association found that over 80 percent of physician respondents currently use some form of AI Nadler and the OpenEvidence team aim to expand the service AI notetaking billing and visit integration functions in the coming years Three Regulation and evidence gap Few studies have rigorously examined how OpenEvidence affects patient outcomes largely due to how recently the tool has exploded in popularity Several researchers including Dr Hannah Galvin are aiming to fill this evidence gap and better understand how OpenEvidence is changing clinical care We want to make sure that we have explored and understood how these tools are performing for our population and that they are making decisions in a fair valid equitable and safe manner Galvin said What to watch next One Clinical outcomes data Without rigorous studies on patient impact the question remains whether faster answers translate to better care Mount Sinai announced a new enterprise partnership with OpenEvidence in March to directly link to the service from the hospital system main electronic health record portal for use by doctors nurses and pharmacists Two Dependence risk While more experienced doctors might have the ability to fall back on years of clinical expertise some worry that reliance on such a medical tool might lead to dependence and misplaced confidence among medical students and junior doctors My worry is that when we introduce a new tool any kind of tool that is doing part of your skills that you had trained up for a while beforehand you start losing those skills pretty quickly said a midcareer doctor in Missouri For patients the reality is that AI is already in the exam room even if it is invisible For clinicians the challenge is to use it as a tool not a replacement for judgment Do you think hospitals should mandate disclosure when AI is used in your clinical decision making Share your view in the comments