OpenEvidence is teaming up with Anthropic to expand its artificial intelligence-powered clinical decision support technology to physicians in low- and middle-income countries across Africa and Asia.
Reuters reported that the initiative is being rolled out in 100 countries, including Uganda, Angola, Sudan, Haiti and Mongolia. Through the partnership, OpenEvidence is providing a specialized version of its platform to healthcare providers for free in lower-resourced regions where limited access to medical literature and specialist expertise can impact patient care, Reuters reported.
An Anthropic spokesperson confirmed that the AI company is partnering with OpenEvidence to expand its clinical intelligence offerings worldwide. OpenEvidence founder Daniel Nadler also confirmed the new initiative.
As a result of the partnership, Anthropic is providing access to Claude Credits, dedicated Anthropic engineers and funding for a team charged with the expansion of access to AI tools to low- and middle-income countries across Africa and Asia.
The work applies AI to one of the world’s most pressing challenges in public health: medical attention and physician capacity, an Anthropic spokesperson said.
The two companies will make efforts to ensure that the research available is adapted and appropriate for patients in local regions, according to Anthropic.
Anthropic's technology will provide back-end support, while OpenEvidence will tailor the system to different regions, taking healthcare infrastructure into account, Reuters reported.
Nadler told Fierce Healthcare that OpenEvidence would tailor its platform based on local medical guidelines in those regions.
OpenEvidence developed an AI-powered medical search engine and a generative AI chatbot exclusively for doctors, which summarizes and simplifies evidence-based medical information. It has grown to become one of the most widely used medical AI and CDS tools in the industry. As of September, there were 1.12 million medical licensed-verified U.S. clinicians, including physicians, nurses, nurse practitioners and physician assistants, using OpenEvidence.
Nadler told Reuters that U.S. clinicians consulted OpenEvidence 42 million times in August alone.
The company also is partnering Penn Medicine to extend its AI-powered clinical decision support to low- and middle-income countries through the Botswana-UPenn Partnership (BUP). The agreement with OpenEvidence enables Penn Medicine teams to design a tool from the ground up that is built to support the particular considerations of practicing in the region, according to the company.
Penn Medicine is making OpenEvidence's AI available to 10,000 clinicians across its seven-hospital U.S. health system.
"OpenEvidence was founded on the belief that the best available medical evidence should reach every clinician, not only those working inside the world's best resourced hospitals," Travis Zack, M.D., Ph.D., OpenEvidence's chief medical officer, said in a statement. "Working with academic partners like Penn Medicine, we're building and rigorously evaluating tools for the varied conditions under which most of the world actually practices medicine."
The Botswana-UPenn Partnership, in existence for 25 years, is one of the longest-running academic health partnerships in sub-Saharan Africa. Working alongside the University of Botswana and Government of Botswana Ministry of Health, BUP has supported the training of Botswana's clinicians and researchers, helped establish postgraduate medical education programs, and conducted research on HIV/AIDS, oncology, and population health. '
"Building a customized set of tools in direct partnership with BUP clinicians and partners reflects a shared conviction that effective clinical AI will be shaped by local expertise and adapted for the conditions they practice in," said Farouk Dako, M.D., director of the Botswana-UPenn Partnership and strategic advisor for academic partnerships at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine Center for Global Health.
"This collaboration offers a model for extending Penn Medicine’s resources and expertise to lower-resource settings through sustainable partnerships," Dako said.