Have a thorny medical question? Your doctor may be using AI for that

Dr. Nicholas Gavin, an emergency medicine doctor at Mount Sinai in New York City, was working an overnight shift last summer when a patient came in with a puzzling set of symptoms. Within seconds, his three younger colleagues -- two medical students and a resident -- were consulting a free artificial-intelligence-powered app for physicians, OpenEvidence.

Gavin soon learned that they were far from outliers. A third of Mount Sinai’s 9,000 doctors were already regular OpenEvidence users, the health system’s executives found out in a meeting last year with the startup’s leaders.

“That was an ‘aha’ moment for our leadership,” said Gavin, who is also the system’s chief clinical innovation officer.

OpenEvidence’s AI 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 startup. A separate survey last year of 1,000 physicians found that 45% 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 startup 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 AI-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, healthcare 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 CEO 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 AI.

The first wave of AI in medicine focused on easing the heavy burden of documentation that contributes to physician burnout with transcriptions and summaries of patient visits, called AI scribe software. The second wave, which is just getting underway, aims to use AI to assist doctors with reliable information and advice to guide diagnosis and treatment while at a patient’s bedside.

The competition has intensified in recent months. UpToDate, a popular legacy electronic reference for doctors, has given its service an AI makeover with a chatbot interface. Doximity, an online professional network for physicians, bought an AI startup that mines medical literature and generates summaries. Abridge, a fast-growing AI scribe maker, is adding decision-support tools. And last month, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT for Clinicians.

OpenEvidence became a front-runner in part because it exclusively used medical journals and other high-quality research as data to train its AI models. Physicians can ask the app specific questions or enter the characteristics and symptoms of a patient and ask for potential explanations. The app is compliant with the federal law that protects patient health information, and physicians are told not to enter any personally identifying information.

OpenEvidence responds with a summary of most likely diagnoses, and then offers other “most important not to miss diagnoses.” Each has links to the research articles that inform the summaries.

“AI is solving some of the problems that have long plagued the practice of medicine,” said Dr. Raja-Elie Abdulnour, chief clinical innovation officer at NEJM Group, which publishes The New England Journal of Medicine. “These tools just didn’t exist before, and that’s why people are so excited about them now.”

Yet the early enthusiasm should be tempered with a large dose of caution, medical experts agree. The research so far into the benefits and shortcomings of AI in medicine is decidedly mixed.

AI has aced standard licensing exams and outperformed human doctors in diagnosing certain cases. But AI has also stumbled, failing to accurately summarize research papers or giving wrong answers to diagnostic questions. And it isn’t going to replace humans anytime soon.

Studies of OpenEvidence, including one by researchers at the Mayo Clinic, have found that while the app is not flawless, its answers are generally accurate and evidence-based.

OpenEvidence is available to any government-verified physician in America as a free, downloadable app.

“We treated physicians like consumers,” Nadler said. Users are presented ads, many of them from drug companies, during the five seconds or so they wait for the AI to reply. Physicians are served ads on 5% of their questions, the company said.

Sidestepping the traditional gatekeepers of hospital technology departments has raised some issues. OpenEvidence has relied on the workplace behavior known as “shadow AI,” workers using such tools without the knowledge or oversight of their employers.

Some health systems are now focusing on bringing OpenEvidence into the institutional fold. Mount Sinai announced in March that it would provide a link to OpenEvidence directly from a patient’s electronic health record.

But the agreement does not give the startup access to the medical center’s patient data. That integration could come later, Gavin said, but only after rigorous testing and controls.

Protecting patient privacy and safety will be “paramount,” he said, adding that “we’re not going to just throw a patient’s data over the wall to a private company.”

Doctors in smaller practices across the country, especially in rural areas, say the technology has won them over.

In Corinth, Mississippi, Dr. Ben Long counts himself as an AI skeptic. But he was reassured that OpenEvidence generates answers based on only high-quality, peer-reviewed information.

At first, Long used it mainly as a reference tool, asking factual questions. But now, he regards the app more as “a consultant, a thought partner” with which he has a dialogue, he said.

“AI forces you to think more deeply about your own thinking, challenging your assumptions and why you might be wrong,” Long said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Copyright 2026 The New York Times Company

This story was originally published June 10, 2026 at 11:01 PM.