Your physician may be quietly leaning on an AI sidekick called OpenEvidence, reports NBC News. The company behind the medical search tool, built specifically for clinicians, estimates that 65% of US doctors are using it to help them decide on treatments, double-check side effects, and even study for licensing exams. Earlier this year, a Bloomberg TV report put the figure at 50%, suggesting it continues to gain traction. "Everyone is using it," Dr. Anupam Jena, an internal medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, tells the outlet. "Its growth really has been exponential."
Think of it as a chatbot that reads top medical journals instead of the open internet, pulling from sources like the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association. CEO Daniel Nadler says the core service will stay free, funded by ads, and boasts that OpenEvidence has pulled off something rare in health care: mass voluntary adoption by doctors. NBC News' Jared Perlo notes that enthusiasm is tempered by concern. Some hospitals restrict what patient details can be entered, researchers say the tool's real-world impact on outcomes is still largely unstudied, and there are worries that younger doctors could become overdependent on it. Still, in an era of "shadow AI" used off the books, some health systems are now formalizing access and trying to set guardrails.
Gizmodo notes that non-doctors can also test it for free without creating an account, and the outlet's Mike Pearl found that "it gives long, detailed answers with extensive citations that superficially look—to me, a non-doctor—trustworthy and credible." He also performed an experiment in which he uploaded deliberately suspect medical advice, and the bot raised "serious patient safety concerns" when assessing.
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