OpenEvidence Captures Doctors’ Collective Wisdom with AI, ft. Zachary Ziegler

OpenEvidence’s CTO shares how 25% of US physicians now rely on its technology daily for life-saving information while navigating complex patient scenarios.

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Zachary Ziegler shared the remarkable growth and real-world impact of OpenEvidence, a medical search platform that has rapidly become an essential tool for physicians across the United States. In just 12 months, Open Evidence has achieved an impressive milestone: over 25% of practicing U.S. physicians now use the platform monthly, with the average user engaging with it daily.

Rather than focusing on technical specifications or roadmap plans, Zachary chose to demonstrate the platform's value through a compelling real-world case study that had been shared with the OpenEvidence team just days before the conference.

The story centered on an internal medicine physician who found herself responding to a medical emergency during a flight. In this high-pressure situation with limited resources at 30,000 feet, Susan turned to Open Evidence for critical information. The situation became more complex when the doctor learned that the patient was taking a certain drug for cancer. Did the patient's condition warrant an emergency landing? The platform helped the doctor determine that the patient’s immunosuppression was urgent but didn't require diverting the flight and confirmed which treatments should be administered after landing.

"Every single patient is a long tail," Zachary explained, highlighting one of the platform's core values. "Every patient has their own comorbidities and context, and it's just really hard to be a doctor. There's just no way to cram all that into one person's head."

This real-world example illustrates how Open Evidence serves as a trusted assistant that physicians can lean on when making complex clinical decisions. As Zachary noted, similar scenarios are happening "ten times a second around the United States and around the entire world."

Related: Daniel Nadler of OpenEvidence on the Training Data podcast

Looking to the future, Zachary briefly highlighted three key development areas for Open Evidence:

1. Deeper integration into physician workflows

2. New modalities for medical reasoning and research

3. A groundbreaking initiative to capture distributed medical knowledge

This last initiative represents a particularly exciting frontier. Zachary explained that while vast amounts of medical knowledge exist in papers and guidelines, even more knowledge is distributed across "millions of wet brains" — the collective wisdom of physicians worldwide.

Thanks to its scale and physician adoption, Open Evidence is uniquely positioned to aggregate this distributed knowledge and incorporate it back into the platform. Zachary shared an early example where answers had been augmented by "the aggregate clinical wisdom of some of the best GI doctors in the entire world," resulting in better guidance and patient care.

As AI continues transforming healthcare, Open Evidence demonstrates how thoughtfully designed tools can augment human expertise rather than replace it, helping physicians navigate complex decisions in moments when lives hang in the balance.