Most U.S. doctors are quietly using this AI tool. Few patients know about it.

Most U.S. doctors are using OpenEvidence to inform medical decision-making.Raven Jiang for NBC NewsArtificial intelligenceMost U.S. doctors are quietly using this AI tool. Few patients know about it.OpenEvidence, an AI-powered medical search tool, has become a fast friend to America’s doctors and is now used by nearly two-thirds of physicians.Listen to this article with a free account00:0000:00ShareAdd NBC News to GoogleMay 13, 2026, 5:30 AM EDTBy Jared PerloYour doctor is probably using AI, even if they haven’t told you about it.Subscribe to read this story ad-free Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content.Over the past two years, medical providers across America have quietly embraced a new AI tool called OpenEvidence to help them make clinical decisions, brush up on medical knowledge and even prepare for their licensing exams. The service, a sort of chatbot for doctors, was used by about 65% of U.S. doctors across almost 27 million clinical encounters in April alone, the company told NBC News.“Everyone is using it,” said Dr. Anupam Jena, an internal medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and a professor of healthcare policy at Harvard. “Its growth really has been exponential.”NBC News spoke with over two dozen doctors, hospital administrators, medical students and healthcare researchers from Hawaii to Maine to explore the rise of OpenEvidence. Each individual said they either used it regularly themselves or knew someone who did.Almost two-thirds of physicians — or roughly 650,000 doctors — in the U.S. actively use OpenEvidence, while another 1.2 million use it internationally, OpenEvidence representatives said. With its quick and tailored replies, OpenEvidence has become an AI-era equivalent of consulting a colleague for their expert opinion, though the software can also write patient discharge notes and provide custom study tools for doctors’ medical exams.“Sixty percent of all the searches are about how to make clinic...