OpenEvidence, a healthcare technology company that provides an AI-powered medical search engine and generative AI chatbot for doctors, is expanding access to its clinical decision support tools in low- and middle-income countries across Africa and Asia through partnerships with Anthropic and Penn Medicine.
Reuters reported that the initiative is being rolled out in 100 countries, including Uganda, Angola, Sudan, Haiti and Mongolia. In lower-resourced regions, OpenEvidence will provide a version of its platform to healthcare providers at no cost, with the deployment adapted to local healthcare infrastructure and medical guidelines, according to the report.
Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude family of models, is supporting the expansion with Claude Credits, engineering resources and funding for a dedicated team. Its technology will provide the back-end layer, while OpenEvidence will adapt the platform to regional requirements, Reuters reported.
The arrangement builds on OpenEvidence's growth in the US. As of September, 1.12 million medically licensed and verified clinicians, including physicians, nurses, nurse practitioners and physician assistants, were using the platform, while founder Daniel Nadler told Reuters that US clinicians consulted it 42 million times in August.
OpenEvidence is also working with Penn Medicine, a US health system with seven hospitals, to develop clinical decision support tools for lower-income settings through the Botswana-UPenn Partnership. The 25-year-old partnership works with healthcare organizations in Botswana on clinician and researcher training, medical education and health research.
The collaboration will allow Penn Medicine teams and local partners to develop a version of OpenEvidence for the conditions in which clinicians in Botswana practice. The company said the partnership is also intended to support the evaluation of the tool in that setting.
"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."
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, said the work is intended to combine clinical AI with local expertise and the conditions in which healthcare is delivered.
"This collaboration offers a model for extending Penn Medicine’s resources and expertise to lower-resource settings through sustainable partnerships," Dako said.
