The news: In the US, 952,000 clinicians submitted 271 million queries to AI medical evidence platform OpenEvidence between January 2024 and June 2026, according to new research in JAMA Network. The data reflects OpenEvidence’s surging clinician adoption: Monthly active users skyrocketed almost 200,000% from 355 in January 2024 to over 703,000 in June 2026, while average monthly queries per user rose from 18 to 39.5.

Zooming out: OpenEvidence has quickly become a leading AI tool for physicians seeking evidence-based answers to clinical questions. Its growth reflects physicians’trust in models trained on peer-reviewed literature and national guidelines through licensing deals with leading medical journals. That aligns with broader AI usage: Researching medical evidence and treatment protocols is physicians’ most commonly cited AI use case, at 39%, per a March American Medical Association report.

Why it matters: Understanding how doctors use AI for clinical care and which types of queries they submit to OpenEvidence is important to help pharma companies more effectively reach doctors.

OpenEvidence makes its platform free for physicians by selling targeted digital ads to pharma and medical device companies. The JAMA study found that most queries focused on clinical decision-making (52%), particularly treatment and management (33%), while 14% addressed diagnosis. The most common query topics were cardiology (9%), infectious disease (8%), and oncology and hematology (7%).

Clinicians’ queries reflected speciality-specific priorities:

• For example, psychiatrists sought medication information more frequently than physicians overall (29% vs. 14%), reflecting their role in managing medications for complex or treatment-resistant conditions.
• And in another example, oncologists and hematologists searched for studies and trials more often than physicians overall (4% vs. 1%), likely driven by rapid advances in cancer and blood disorder therapies.

Implications for pharma marketers: Varying search trends across disciplines enable drugmakers to engage physicians with tailored data at the point of decision-making, where OpenEvidence serves as a leading AI resource.

However, the window to capture attention is narrow: targeted ads appear in just 5% of queries and last only seconds while AI generates a response. That makes OpenEvidence better suited for concise, evidence-driven claims, like a key treatment benefit in a doctor’s discipline. Drugmakers can then direct physicians to more detailed clinical evidence through other channels.