New Penn Med AI tool aims to improve clinical decision-making

Roughly 10,000 clinicians across Penn Medicine will now have access to an artificial intelligence chatbot for clinical purposes.

OpenEvidence, a widely-used medical AI and clinical decision-making tool among physicians, announced its partnership with Penn on Tuesday. The tool will be available to Penn Med physicians around the world, including those participating in the University’s ongoing work in Botswana. 

“The Botswana-UPenn Partnership is a model for extending cutting edge technologies, such as OpenEvidence, to partners in the global south,” Director and Strategic Advisor for Academic Partnerships in Global Health Farouk Dako wrote in a statement. 

According to Dako, the partnership emphasizes collaboration “to ensure appropriate testing and impactful deployment.” 

The Botswana-UPenn Partnership is a 25-year-long collaboration focused on improving healthcare capacity in Botswana. It is one of the longest-running academic health partnerships in sub-Saharan Africa.

Penn’s collaboration will allow teams to design tools “built to support the particular considerations of practicing in the region,” OpenEvidence wrote in the Sept. 15 announcement.  

“The best available medical evidence should reach every clinician, not only those working inside the world's best resourced hospitals,” OpenEvidence Chief Medical Officer Travis Zack wrote. “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.”

The chatbot can help deliver insights for diagnoses, treatment options, and overall patient care. It is also capable of writing patient discharge notes and providing custom study tools for medical exams.

“At Penn Medicine, our mission in pursuit of clinical excellence very much includes efforts to extend it to all areas where it can have the greatest impact,” Vice President and Chief Health Information Officer at the University of Pennsylvania Health System Srinath Adusumalli wrote in the press release.

He added that the partnership gives physicians the “ability to instantly surface the best available medical evidence in the context of the patient in front of them.”

According to the National Institutes of Health, the tool allows clinicians to directly request evidence “without needing to spend hours sifting through articles.” 

Earlier this month, Penn rolled out access to a paid version of Anthropic’s Claude platform for all active faculty, staff, and students. That service, however, was not approved for HIPAA-covered environments, such as Penn Medicine, the Perelman School of Medicine, the School of Dental Medicine, and Penn Student Wellness.

In January, scientists across the Health System spoke to The Daily Pennsylvanian about how they are integrating AI and machine learning into their research. At the time, Penn Med faculty said they used the technology to assist with everything from pattern detection and risk prediction to large-scale data analysis.

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