Steve Lohr, The New York Times; Have a Thorny Medical Question? Your Doctor May Be Using A.I. for That
"OpenEvidence’s A.I. app, essentially a chatbot for medicine, has become a viral hit with physicians. Talk to a doctor and chances are he or she uses the app to ask specific medical questions or bounce ideas off it in a diagnostic dialogue.
More than half of the nation’s physicians are regular users. Last month, they used it for 30 million questions and consultations, nearly twice the volume from six months earlier, according to the start-up. A separate survey last year of 1,000 physicians found that 45 percent of them used the app, nearly triple the percentage who used ChatGPT, according to Offcall, a career information service for doctors.
That growth propelled the start-up to a $12 billion valuation in January, up from $3.5 billion last July.
But doctors’ quick adoption of the app since its introduction in 2024 — one of a handful of A.I.-enhanced programs on the market seeking to win over physicians — has heightened concerns about how and when the technology should be used in life-or-death situations. In a high-stakes field like medicine, health care systems are navigating thorny matters of patient privacy, safety and trust, as well as the limitations of the technology itself.
“It’s not an oracle, it’s a tool,” said Daniel Nadler, founder and chief executive of OpenEvidence. “Knowledge and knowledge workers still matter.
The doctor’s office has been a target for computer-assisted decision making for decades, with very limited success until the recent advances of A.I."
