The hottest AI healthcare topic online is creating another growth legend! OpenEvidence reports that nearly two-thirds of U.S. doctors, approximately 650,000, are actively using its tools, with an additional 1.2 million international doctors also utilizing the software. This figure represents exponential growth compared to last year when OpenEvidence secured 40% of U.S. doctors as users. In April alone, U.S. doctors used OpenEvidence in 27 million clinical encounters, demonstrating its high frequency of use. Notably, according to an American Medical Association survey, AI healthcare penetration among U.S. doctors is 80%. OpenEvidence's penetration exceeding 65% alone highlights its massive user base. It is worth mentioning that OpenEvidence's announcement of its latest growth data is particularly intriguing. In April, OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Clinicians, a tool directly competing with OpenEvidence by providing evidence-based Q&A, literature citation, and clinical decision support for doctors, declaring open competition. This sudden announcement of 65% coverage among U.S. doctors and 27 million monthly clinical uses precisely counters OpenAI's offensive. Does OpenEvidence possess an extremely high moat, or will giant entrants deliver a disruptive blow? What is the status of the domestic evidence-based AI healthcare tools market?
Valuation at $12 billion represents the ceiling for medical AI. Doctors face increasing pressure, responsible not only for diagnosis, treatment, and teaching but also for heavy research tasks, creating an urgent need for better information access. OpenEvidence identified this pain point, offering AI-driven professional diagnostic tools free to the doctor community to aid clinical decision-making. The core challenge in getting doctors to adopt AI lies in minimizing AI hallucinations and ensuring answer accuracy. Unlike ChatGPT's product logic, OpenEvidence is built on evidence-based medicine, allowing one-click tracing of medical knowledge sources to minimize hallucinations as much as possible. Most crucially, OpenEvidence has established strategic content partnerships with the American Medical Association, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and top medical specialty journals including JAMA Oncology and JAMA Neurology. Notably, it is exclusively available to healthcare professionals. Practitioners must register an account and provide a unique U.S. government-issued healthcare ID number. After registration, providers can ask unlimited medical questions for free. Leveraging strong product reputation, OpenEvidence quickly spread by word-of-mouth among doctors and rapidly accumulated a large user base of medical product users. By 2025, the company had secured registrations from over 40% of U.S. doctors. Today, OpenEvidence has become an "expert consultation" tool for doctors seeking specialist opinions in the AI era. Additionally, the software can draft patient discharge summaries and provide customized learning tools for doctors' physical examinations. Based on these achievements, OpenEvidence has gained market favor, raising over $700 million across four funding rounds in just one year, with its valuation soaring to $12 billion. Post-funding, OpenEvidence plans to expand its service scale, including features like AI note-taking, clinical visit integration, and medical research.
Giants are fully following suit. Why is OpenEvidence so popular in the market? Simply put, it applied internet logic to create a professional AI healthcare application and succeeded. Traditionally, AI applications require rigorous regulatory approvals, hospital evaluations, and complex procurement processes before reaching doctors. By offering free use to doctors, OpenEvidence quickly accumulated a base of high-value doctor users and monetized through advertising. In 2025, OpenEvidence's Annual Recurring Revenue reached $150 million, with the company stating that if all ad inventory were sold, revenue could exceed $1 billion. Its success has even attracted major AI and internet giants domestically and internationally. In April, OpenAI officially released its AI tool for doctors, ChatGPT for Clinicians. This tool focuses on the evidence-based medicine track, capable of real-time retrieval of authoritative medical literature to provide clinical diagnostic evidence for doctors, while extending to scenarios like clinical documentation and patient communication. Real-world testing showed a 99.6% accuracy rate in 6,924 actual usage scenarios. The tool is already offered free to U.S. doctors. Just days ago, ALI HEALTH officially launched its AI Medical Assistant Hydrogen Ion and secured exclusive medical AI cooperation rights in China with the BMJ Group. Hydrogen Ion, as a doctor-specific evidence-based AI assistant, emphasizes low hallucination, strong evidence-base, and traceability for every statement. Moreover, Hydrogen Ion has previously established deep collaborations with the Chinese Medical Association, People's Medical Publishing House, and the Chinese Anti-Cancer Association, covering Chinese guidelines, consensus documents, and textbooks. Even the traditional tool being disrupted, UpToDate, is accelerating its efforts. Reportedly, UpToDate is hastening the deployment of its self-developed AI tool, Expert AI. As of April 30, approximately 2,000 hospitals and healthcare systems have registered to use Expert AI.
Who can become China's version of OpenEvidence? Is it possible for a phenomenon-level application similar to OpenEvidence to emerge in China? The answer is entirely possible. According to authoritative data from the health commission, China has 5.082 million licensed (assistant) physicians and 5.855 million registered nurses. Notably, data from the American Medical Association shows 81% of doctors use AI professionally, nearly doubling since 2023. The average number of AI use cases per doctor also increased from 1.1 to 2.3. China's AI healthcare penetration has significant room for growth. A domestic "ChatGPT for doctors" is quietly taking shape, with several companies seen as strong contenders against OpenEvidence. Baichuan Intelligence, founded by Wang Xiaochuan, has Baixiaoying as its core product. It currently positions itself with a dual focus akin to "Ant Afu + OpenEvidence," allowing users to choose patient/family or doctor identities, with the product correspondingly offering health consultation or evidence-based medical support. Zero Hypothesis, founded in 2019, is also creating handy evidence-based medicine tools for doctors and pharmaceutical companies. To reduce "hallucinations," Zero Hypothesis chose to build its own vertical medical database, including literature, guidelines, global medical conference data, and clinical trials, with real-time updates. In October 2025, Zero Hypothesis secured hundreds of millions in funding from investors including HeTang Venture Capital, Guofang Innovation, Shanghai Zheyu Investment, and Yuanhe Origin, and is exploring diversified commercial paths involving doctors and pharmaceutical companies. Additionally, Lingxi Medical claims its platform has already acquired 200,000 doctor users and serves the precision marketing needs of multiple pharmaceutical companies. Overall, this sector has moved from proof-of-concept to a stage of differentiated competition. The key lies in who can better align with the real workflows of Chinese doctors and establish a sustainable business model. However, multiple industry insiders note that Europe and the U.S. have established basic clinical guidelines for evidence-based medicine, while Chinese clinical practice has long relied on senior expert experience and traditional departmental therapies, with older-generation doctors prioritizing clinical experience over literature evidence. The emergence of AI evidence-based tools can help establish China's own evidence-based medicine system. This means a phenomenon-level evidence-based medicine AI application will undoubtedly emerge in China, not as a replica of OpenEvidence, but as a local product that better understands Chinese doctors and is more adapted to China's healthcare system. After all, China faces a vastly different medical environment, payer landscape, and doctor habits. Future developments of the aforementioned companies will be closely monitored.
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