The news: OpenAI is launching ChatGPT for Clinicians, a version of ChatGPT designed to support clinical tasks such as documentation and searching for medical research. The tool is free for any physician, physician assistant, nurse practitioner, or pharmacist who is verified in the US with a National Provider Identifier number.

Digging into the details: ChatGPT for Clinicians is an extension of OpenAI for Healthcare, introduced in January, that allows health systems to deploy ChatGPT to physicians. This update is designed to provide access to individual clinicians whose organizations don’t have a centralized AI tool, per STAT. Physician advisors review the product’s healthcare responses every few minutes. To date, they’ve assessed 700,000 model outputs reflecting real-world clinician and patient use of ChatGPT, according to OpenAI.

Why it matters: OpenAI now faces rising competition from AI-powered clinical decision support tools that help doctors swiftly access peer-reviewed research. One standout, OpenEvidence, is rapidly gaining traction as a leading medical search platform, claiming daily use by 40% of US physicians. Often dubbed “ChatGPT for Doctors,” OpenEvidence now positions itself in even more direct competition with OpenAI—the maker of ChatGPT itself.

More broadly, doctors are increasingly using AI to quickly surface evidence-based research and established care protocols—one of the tech's leading clinical use cases.

• 72% of physicians report using AI in clinical practice, up from 48% last year, per a February survey from the American Medical Association.
• Summaries of clinical research and best-practice standards for patient care are the top use cases, per the AMA study.

Implications for healthcare AI companies: OpenAI says clinician use of its public ChatGPT has doubled over the past year, suggesting doctors are increasingly comfortable using it in their workflow. That familiarity could give OpenAI an edge as it tries to reel in physicians to its verified, clinical version—competing not just with OpenEvidence, but also with similar established tools like UpToDate and Doximity.

To win and keep providers, AI companies must deliver the most reliable, efficient product built on premier medical journals and evidence-based data. They will also need to understand physician and organizational preferences around in-platform advertising, which some AI search tools use instead of subscription fees. Pharma ads can introduce concerns about bias, trust, and clinical integrity, while licensing fees may create financial friction and disadvantage smaller or resource-constrained practices.

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