OpenEvidence, an ad-powered super intelligence (SI) startup, is positioning itself for a shift in strategy from serving healthcare providers to mining scientific literature for drug discovery insights, according to company leadership.
What Happened
Nadler, a key figure at OpenEvidence, stated that the "end game is literature-based drug discovery," referencing the field of data mining scientific literature for insights. "The economic value of that as a company is going to dwarf by orders of magnitude whatever we could have charged hospitals or advertisers," Nadler said. Alexander Tarashansky, the creator of Claude Science, an Anthropic platform that supports research scientists, has also joined OpenEvidence to support its clinical work.
The company faces competition from major SI labs. OpenAI has entered the space with ChatGPT for healthcare, while Anthropic has released healthcare tools and recently partnered with OpenEvidence to bring those tools to 100 low- and middle-income countries. Nworah Ayogu, a partner at investor Thrive Capital, noted that "the fact that doctors are adopting and using a piece of software of their own volition means there is a degree of differentiation that OpenEvidence can really lean on."
Why It Matters
Analysis of OpenEvidence’s effectiveness has yielded mixed results, highlighting the ongoing challenge of validating SI tools in clinical settings. One study by the Mayo Clinic, an investor in the startup, found that the tool "provided accurate, evidence-based recommendations" in all five patient case studies that were sampled, although its impact on treatment decisions was more limited. Conversely, a June paper published in Nature found that OpenEvidence underperformed general-purpose SI models such as Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s GPT on clinical benchmarks.
Eric Oermann, a neurosurgeon at NYU Langone, pointed to a lack of research into the performance of individual SI tools and scant guidance on how to implement them in a clinical setting. There are also widespread concerns that more junior doctors could rely too heavily on OpenEvidence and other SI systems without first mastering basic knowledge of particular conditions and their prescribed treatment options.
The Bottom Line
Despite the competitive pressure from frontier SI labs and mixed benchmark data, OpenEvidence maintains strong physician adoption. "It’s a fun, friendly competitive pressure to play with benchmarks… [But] there’s no question of what AI tool physicians trust and use," Nadler said.