Daniel Nadler, the founder of OpenEvidence, said access to medical knowledge should not depend on geography as his company and Anthropic announced a partnership on Tuesday, 22 September to expand an artificial intelligence clinical tool to physicians in about 100 countries.
The rollout is intended for regions where doctors have limited access to medical literature, specialist expertise and continuing medical education. Those gaps can impair patient care, particularly when clinicians need current research or guidance to inform treatment decisions.
Uganda, Angola, Sudan, Haiti and Mongolia are among the countries included in the initiative. The partners said a specialised version of the platform will be available free to healthcare providers in dozens of low- and middle-income countries. They did not give a timetable for the wider rollout or identify the other countries involved.
OpenEvidence is designed to answer doctors’ questions using peer-reviewed medical research and treatment guidelines. The platform is already free for clinicians in the United States and Europe, where US clinicians used it 42 million times in August.
Anthropic will provide the back-end technology for the new programme. OpenEvidence will adapt the system for different regions, taking account of local healthcare infrastructure. Financial terms of the collaboration were undisclosed.
The localisation work addresses concerns around artificial intelligence systems trained on data from high-income countries. Such systems may fail to reflect the medical environments of low-income nations, including the diagnostic resources and disease patterns that can shape a clinician’s choices.
The partnership builds on earlier pilots in Rwanda and Botswana. In Rwanda, 45 local doctors and nurses tested the tool and provided feedback through a project carried out with the Rwanda Biomedical Center and Resolve to Save Lives. The companies gave no published results or outcome measures from those pilots.
Daniela Amodei, Anthropic’s president, is leading the company’s side of a collaboration that moves its technology into a specialised medical setting. Anthropic recently established a laboratory for physical biology research aimed at artificial intelligence applications in drug development.
For OpenEvidence, the programme extends a service already used heavily by clinicians in developed markets into healthcare systems where access to research and specialist advice can be harder to obtain. For Anthropic, it creates a further application for its technology while leaving several practical questions unresolved, including how the system will fit into existing health systems and how long the free model will continue.
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