Casey Newton

Wow.

So yeah, the statistics that I've seen are that more than 40% of doctors now are using this, which is pretty crazy uptake for something that was just started a couple of years ago back in 2022.

In March, Open Evidence reported that in a single 24-hour period, doctors consulted the AI system a million times.

I've been fascinated by open evidence.

I've never used it myself, but I have friends who are doctors or nurses, and they have said what you've said, that basically just everyone, especially on the younger end of medicine, is just using this thing constantly.

So give us a sense of how this open evidence tool works.

What situations is it used for, and what are its strengths and weaknesses?

Now, are they actually uploading patient data to this?

Or are they just sort of describing patients in generic and anonymized ways to get back some decision support?

And are there any AI tools that are integrated with patient health records?

This has been an area where I think there's just been a lot of pushback of like, I don't want my personal health data, my protected health data going into one of these cloud-based AI systems.

But are there hospital systems or medical systems that are bringing this stuff directly into contact with patient data?

Yeah.

I've noticed that when I and my friends go to the doctor now, we often are presenting our information to a chatbot first and then coming into the doctor with sort of a readout of what the chatbot has told us.

This is, of course, not a new phenomenon.

People have been doing this with WebMD results for many years.

But is this something that you're seeing now is that many more patients are coming to you having already discussed whatever's going on for them with a chatbot?

Yeah.

I'm curious, Adam, out here in San Francisco, there are all these fitness people and health maxers, people who love to track themselves using all manner of devices, and people are getting these full-body workups from companies like Function Health that are sort of concierge medicine things, and they'll get 100 labs done, and then they'll upload all that data into Claude or ChatGPT and just sort of

treat it as a sort of first line medical professional in their lives.