OpenEvidence Brings Hands-Free Medical AI to 860,000 Clinicians

A physician’s day is a stack of interruptions: patient calls come in on personal phones, notes get typed after hours, documentation tools sit in one tab and medical references in another. Each handoff between systems costs time that high-volume clinical environments don’t have.

OpenEvidence is building to close those gaps. The company’s artificial intelligence (AI)-powered medical search engine, now used by 860,000 licensed and verified U.S. clinicians, launched Voice Mode: a hands-free feature that lets clinicians ask clinical questions and receive spoken, evidence-based answers without touching a screen. It’s live across web and mobile, free for all users.

The workflow is frictionless by design. A clinician can tap an icon, ask a question and hear a concise answer drawn from sources including the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Cochrane and NCCN guidelines. Every spoken response includes a written transcript and underlying references within the same conversation. A second tap mutes the mic in noisy settings, and clinicians can interrupt mid-answer to redirect.

“When I’m in the ED, I’m never at a workstation when I actually need an answer,” Ania Bilski, M.D., vice president of clinical AI at OpenEvidence and a practicing emergency medicine physician at University of California, San Francisco and Kaiser Permanente, told Fierce Healthcare.

Daniel Nadler, founder and CEO of OpenEvidence, said the company has spent years on the intelligence behind the platform. Voice Mode, he said, advances the interface to match the everyday reality of practicing medicine.

Hospitals Are Moving Fast

The Voice Mode launch arrived alongside a new health system partnership. Cedars-Sinai joined Mount Sinai and Sutter Health in deploying OpenEvidence across their enterprises, giving physicians, nurses, pharmacists and therapists access to the platform integrated directly into their electronic health record (EHR) workflows. Shaun Miller, M.D., chief health informatics officer at Cedars-Sinai, said the health system opted for an enterprise-wide rollout to ensure equitable access and gather broad feedback across specialties.

All three health systems skipped pilot programs and currently run on OpenEvidence’s ad-supported model. Nadler said a non-ad-supported enterprise pricing tier is in development for large systems that want customization beyond the core free product.

The platform now fields more than 1 million clinical questions per day and is actively used daily by more than the majority of U.S. physicians, spanning more than 10,000 hospitals and medical centers nationwide. OpenEvidence raised $250 million in a Series D round in January at a $12 billion valuation, with investors including Google Ventures, Nvidia, Thrive Capital and Mayo Clinic.

Burnout Is the Business Case

The clinical AI market is crowded. Microsoft introduced Dragon Copilot in March 2025, combining voice dictation and ambient listening to convert doctor-patient conversations into clinical notes.

Every vendor is competing on the same pressure point. Healthcare firms are adopting AI where the strain is most visible. A PYMNTS Intelligence report found that 60% of healthcare firms use AI for customer service and patient-facing interactions, the sector’s single highest-reported use case. Integration with existing systems and fragmented data remain the two biggest barriers, each cited by 30% of healthcare executives surveyed.

OpenEvidence’s answer is to build across the full workflow rather than solve one task well. It now spans medical search, clinical documentation, patient communications, medical coding and voice. The hospital partnerships extend that reach into the EHR itself. Voice Mode extends it to wherever the clinician happens to be standing.