Exclusive-Anthropic, OpenEvidence partner to bring medical AI worldwide

By Nancy Lapid

Sept 22 (Reuters) - Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic ‌and medical knowledge ​platform OpenEvidence ​are collaborating to bring AI-powered clinical decision support to physicians in regions without access to the technology, the companies said on Tuesday.

OpenEvidence answers doctors' questions by drawing on peer-reviewed medical research and ‌treatment guidelines. The platform is free to clinicians in the United States and Europe.

The new initiative ⁠is a specialized version available to healthcare providers for free in dozens of low- and middle-income countries where limited access to medical literature, specialist ‌expertise and continuing medical education can ‌impair patient care.

Healthcare systems worldwide are exploring whether generative AI can help address shortages of physicians and specialists. Supporters argue that AI tools can help clinicians quickly navigate vast amounts of medical information, while critics caution that ​systems trained primarily on data from high-income countries may not reflect local practice conditions.

The initiative is being rolled out in about 100 countries, including Uganda, Angola, Sudan, Haiti, and Mongolia, according to a list provided by ⁠OpenEvidence.

"Access to medical knowledge shouldn't depend on geography," OpenEvidence founder Daniel Nadler said.

Reuters reported last week that Anthropic had built a lab to do physical biology ​work as it pushes its artificial intelligence ambitions into drug science and as fears of AI's reach grip the public, with some executives and lawmakers calling for a slowdown ​in development.

Anthropic and OpenEvidence did not disclose financial terms of the ‌collaboration.

REGIONAL DIFFERENCES

In August alone, US clinicians consulted OpenEvidence 42 million times, according to Nadler. In 2026, several hundred million Americans will have been treated by a doctor who used OpenEvidence to ⁠help guide care, he said.

Anthropic's technology will provide back-end support, while OpenEvidence will tailor the system to different regions, taking healthcare infrastructure into account, the companies said.

“The technology itself has advanced so dramatically that the sort of structure needed for (bringing OpenEvidence to low-resource ⁠regions) is there, but the market incentives alone would not let it happen without this type of entrepreneurial, philanthropically minded work,” Anthropic ​president Daniela Amodei said.

Earlier this year, OpenEvidence said it was working with health organizations in Rwanda and Botswana to adapt its tools for settings where disease patterns, diagnostic resources and available treatments differ markedly from those in wealthier countries.

“One hundred percent of what ‌we are building for these places is context adaptive,” Nadler said.

Even where medical facilities don’t have around-the-clock electricity, most physicians do have smartphones, he said, which means access to quality ‌medical information that a decade ago would only be available at leading institutions like the Mayo Clinic.

Dr. Ahmed Bendary, a cardiologist at ⁠Benha University in Egypt, said expanding this access ‌outside the United States and Europe "would ​be a tremendous leap forward, particularly in regions where institutional subscriptions to major medical journals are limited, making evidence-based, point-of-care tools even more vital."

(Reporting by Nancy Lapid; editing by Caroline Humer and ‌David Gaffen)

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