Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Nearly two-thirds of US doctors are turning to an AI-powered search engine to make patient decisions, propelling a little-known tech start-up to a $15bn valuation while prompting a debate over the future of patient care. Miami-based Open Evidence, founded by serial entrepreneur Daniel Nadler in 2022, said that many of America's 1mn physicians processed more than 42mn prompts last month.
Doctors are using the company's chatbot to scour medical journals and clinical guidelines to help diagnose and treat patients. The ads-powered platform has grown largely by word of mouth, penetrating a sector where few tools have seen similar traction. "We're the first viral consumer internet app in healthcare," Nadler told the FT in an interview. Open Evidence has won praise from medical professionals who have found it helped ease workloads, according to interviews with eight senior physicians.
But it faces a nascent threat from large AI companies such as Open AI and Anthropic, who are making a push into the space. Its growing influence has also prompted scrutiny from researchers concerned over the accuracy of its results, as doctors grow more dependent on an AI tool shaping the course of treatments. The company's rapid ascent has attracted nearly $1bn in investment in the past 18 months, from backers including Andreessen Horowitz, Blackstone, Thrive Capital and Sequoia.
The group raised $250mn in its latest funding round in September at a $15bn valuation. Daniel Nadler's company has broken into an established market for medical software that was sluggish to incorporate generative AI models. Dutch IT group Wolters Kluwer released an AI version of its leading subscription-based Up To Date medical software tool in October 2025, nearly two years after Open Evidence entered the market.
Central to the Open Evidence's pitch is a focused source list consisting of peer-reviewed journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association. "Open Evidence allows me to provide a lot of context about my patient, find information and make decisions faster," said Nina Singh, a medical resident at the University of California San Francisco. "It's a really useful tool." Widespread appeal has helped Open Evidence forge relationships with several hospitals and specialist clinics such as Mount Sinai Health System and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, embedding its tool within the organisations' electronic health records. Open Evidence's source list consists of peer-reviewed material such as the New England Journal of Medicine Paul Testa, chief health informatics officer at NYU Langone, said that the hospital system sought a formal tie-up with Open Evidence after it found clinicians were already using the tool as an "independent resource". "We chose to deeply integrate a clinically informed version of Open Evidence into the care process to ensure two things: first, our clinicians can get the most from these AI tools, and second, they use them securely," he said. Open Evidence has leveraged its popularity with doctors to slowly expand into other domains including ambient documentation -- note-taking during doctors' patient interactions.
Critics have questioned whether the company's ad-based model warrants its high valuation, while...
Source: Financial Times Companies · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing