OpenEvidence built voice AI capabilities as part of its popular medical search engine, allowing doctors to ask questions hands-free and get evidence-based answers.
Voice Mode is a native voice recognition medical AI interface that OpenEvidence says is the first multimodal medical AI product for clinical decision support. The feature is available in OpenEvidence’s web and mobile apps and is free to all users, according to the company.
According to executives, doctors can use the voice mode feature to interact with OpenEvidence while moving between rooms, making rounds, walking down the hallway outside the operating room, or while completing a chart with one hand while on the phone.
OpenEvidence has been beta testing the voice mode feature and the feedback has been “very positive,” OpenEvidence founder and CEO Daniel Nadler told Fierce Healthcare.
“Clinicians say that Voice Mode allows them to ask questions while commuting to work or walking around the hospital, and some say that when they talk to Voice Mode in the shower, they are more likely to get concise answers for puzzling cases,” Nadler said.
To use the voice mode feature, clinicians tap the orange waveform icon to ask a question and hear concise audio answers drawn from the same sources that power OpenEvidence today, including the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Cochrane, and NCCN guidelines, according to the company.
“There are two sides to building medical AI: intelligence and interfaces. We’ve spent years on intelligence, and with voice mode, we’re evolving the interfaces to fit the everyday realities of the medical field,” Nadler said.
OpenEvidence has developed an AI-powered medical search engine and physician-specific generative AI chatbot that summarizes and simplifies evidence-based medical information. Nadler said 860,000 licensed U.S. clinicians, including nurses, nurse practitioners and physician assistants, are currently using OpenEvidence, and more than 650,000 U.S. licensed physicians are using OpenEvidence.
OpenEvidence raised a $250 million Series D round in January, doubling its valuation to $12 billion. The company was valued at $6 billion in October after raising $200 million in a Series C funding round, just three months after raising $210 million in a Series B funding round in July.
OpenEvidence has raised about $700 million in the past year.
The company has experienced rapid growth and now responds to more than 1 million clinical questions per day. According to the company, OpenEvidence is currently actively used, on average, every day by the majority of physicians in the United States across more than 10,000 hospitals and medical centers across the country. The company has expanded from clinical search into other clinical workflows, putting it in more direct competition with companies like Wolters Kluwer’s UpToDate and Elsevier.
In August, the company unveiled its Visits feature, a clinical AI assistant that transcribes patient visits. The company made its AI-integrated doctor dialer feature more widely available and directly took over Doximity’s core business. In March, the company released an AI-powered medical coding feature that automatically provides Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) code suggestions and Evaluation and Management (E/M) level recommendations.
The new voice mode feature makes the feature available to clinicians who are not in front of the screen. Voice responses are short and easy to hear. Because references and complete writing remain in the conversation, the verification standards are the same as for written responses, executives said.
All verbal responses are accompanied by a written record of the same conversation and underlying references. Clinicians can pause mid-answer to redirect or refine their questions. In noisy environments, a tap will mute your microphone until you’re ready to speak again. For physicians who prefer voice input without providing an audible response, a separate microphone icon enters the question as text in the standard OpenEvidence search.
“When you’re in the emergency department, you’re not at your workstation when you actually need answers. You’re wearing gloves, you’re gowning, you’re making calls, you’re in between patients. Voice mode gives you the answers you need in between,” said Ania Bilski, MD, vice president of clinical AI at OpenEvidence and director of emergency medicine at UCSF and Kaiser Permanente.
OpenEvidence’s corporate ambitions
While the company gained traction in the market as a free tool for clinicians, OpenEvidence is now setting its sights on expanding its footprint with hospitals and health systems. In the past three months, the company announced partnerships with Mount Sinai and Sutter Health to integrate its AI-based medical search and decision support platform into the organizations’ electronic health record systems.
This week, Cedars-Sinai joined that list, offering clinicians corporate access to OpenEvidence, allowing them to combine medical evidence with relevant information from patients’ electronic health records. Through the partnership, Cedars-Sinai physicians, nurses, pharmacists and therapists will be able to ask clinical questions and search medical literature related to individual patients’ health profiles, the health system said.
Sutter Health, Mount Sinai, and Cedars-Sinai currently use OpenEvidence’s ad-supported model.
“Advertising has long been part of how clinicians access medical research through journals, and this represents a similar model in digital format. Our priority is to ensure the experience maintains clinical integrity and supports quality care,” Sean Miller, MD, chief medical information officer at Cedars-Sinai, told Fierce Healthcare.
Nadler said an enterprise model is in development.
“We are pioneering a standard, ad-supported AI enterprise model, similar to Anthropic’s business model, for large systems like Mount Sinai and Cedars-Sinai that need that option, and where there is an opportunity for enterprise-level customization and value-add beyond the core free OpenEvidence product for physicians,” he said.
Miller said OpenEvidence stands out for its “AI-native approach to synthesizing clinical evidence directly within the workflow.”
“We also heard the strong desire from clinicians for ease of use and saw an opportunity to partner with an innovative company that is advancing ways to efficiently deliver evidence in a safe and secure manner,” Miller said.
“We chose an enterprise-wide rollout to ensure equitable access, accelerate adoption, and gather broad and early feedback across specialties and a variety of clinical roles. We will evaluate clinician engagement, impact on workflow, and how effectively these tools support clinical decision-making,” Miller said.
Miller noted that the company-wide rollout of OpenEvidence ties into Cedars-Sinai’s broader AI strategy. “This reflects our strategy to embed AI directly into workflows while partnering with leading innovators to scale meaningful impact. The goal is to seamlessly integrate AI into the way clinicians safely deliver high-quality care,” he said.
Health systems are seeing strong demand from clinicians for access to OpenEvidence within EHRs, according to organizational leaders.
“Clinicians, especially physicians, have been asking for it,” Dr. Nicholas Gavin, vice president and chief clinical innovation officer at Mount Sinai Health System, told Fierce Healthcare. Mount Sinai announced a partnership with OpenEvidence in March.
“In every health system, there are a few senior clinicians that we all turn to with difficult cases. They are the doctor houses of the world. As we were working on this partnership, one of the senior physicians at Mount Sinai came up to me. I didn’t know if he was an advocate or a detractor, so I said, ‘What do you think? When should we end this?’ His answer was, ‘yesterday.’ There are very few technological tools that can get that kind of response from clinicians,” Gavin said.
Health systems often deploy new technologies through pilot projects before expanding more broadly, but three health systems had enterprise-wide deployments from the beginning.
“We believe this tool can transform care by providing information and insight at the point of care. We are always piloting it with the goal of expanding it as needed. That was not the case this time, but we will continue to conduct usability and evaluations,” Gavin said.
Mount Sinai executives said providing clinicians with AI-powered medical evidence in the clinical setting reflects Mount Sinai’s broader vision to responsibly extend AI across the health care system.
“One of our core goals is to advance precision healthcare delivery, and AI and digital tools are essential to this,” Gavin said. “This is one of the tools to help us get there. Our ultimate goal is to integrate patient data and the latest evidence in real time to provide accurate insight and guidance to clinical teams who are always trying to do more. No one can achieve the standards we hold to every patient in isolation. This will help us get closer to the ideal state.”
