Daniel Nadler launched OpenEvidence—a medical information platform that's like ChatGPT for doctors—because of a happy problem in medicine. In 1950, the rate of medical knowledge doubled every 50 years. Today, it doubles every five years.
“The reason is a great reason, which is the golden age of biotechnology,” says Nadler, an artist, poet, and tech entrepreneur who became interested in positive uses for AI while working in machine learning. But it means doctors need to keep up with an overwhelming amount of information, such as clinical trial results and new treatments. Staying on top of it all is "basically impossible.” He’s calculated that at least one new medical paper is published every minute, and if doctors read only the new evidence in the top 10 journals, it would still require nine hours of their day. “You would literally never have time to see patients,” he says. “Most doctors don’t do that, and they miss new findings.”
Enter OpenEvidence, an AI-powered search engine that sifts through thousands of peer-reviewed studies in real time. Nadler describes it as a “brain extender” for clinicians. Many report using it to make high-stakes clinical decisions, like analyzing new treatments and figuring out which makes the most sense for a patient. To determine if a just-approved psoriasis drug is safe for a pregnant patient, for example, doctors would “need to go fairly deep on the data.” By searching OpenEvidence, however, that information will be quickly and succinctly aggregated, at their fingertips before the patient leaves the office.
In February, OpenEvidence signed a content-use agreement with the New England Journal of Medicine, which grants it permission to use all of the journal’s findings from 1990 on. Nearly 30% of doctors in the U.S. currently use the tool, Nadler says; more than 50 million patients will be treated this year by a doctor using OpenEvidence. It can be especially valuable in rural areas, allowing doctors to access the kind of expert guidance that would otherwise be scarce.
“This is a very different type of medical innovation or medical revolution,” he says, “because we've very quickly reached across the country to the middle of the country, to the health care deserts, to the health care islands, to the fringes and edges of health care.”