Johns Hopkins Medicine is teaming up with OpenEvidence to advance the use of artificial intelligence in medical education and clinical care.
OpenEvidence and Johns Hopkins executives provided Fierce Healthcare with a first look at the partnership news.
The health system and academic institution will partner with OpenEvidence to develop what they describe as "human-first AI systems" that combine the best available evidence with a patient’s medical history and Johns Hopkins’ clinical best practices to support care delivery. Sophisticated AI will help clinicians reason through that information more quickly, contextualize it, and make the best decisions for their patients, executives said.
"On the clinical side, we're interested in exploring how we can bring evidence-based AI more directly into clinical workflows, helping clinicians access and apply the latest medical knowledge in the context of individual patient care," Sara Murray, M.D. chief medical informatics and AI officer at Johns Hopkins Medicine, told Fierce Healthcare via email.
"Our goal is to work together to identify high-impact clinical use cases, develop solutions that fit naturally into how clinicians work and rigorously evaluate their impact on clinical decision-making, quality, and patient outcomes," Murray said.
The two organizations are still early in defining the specific capabilities they will develop together, Murray noted. "We see a significant opportunity to move beyond standalone medical information tools toward AI that is meaningfully integrated into the delivery of care," she said.
OpenEvidence is a widely used clinical decision support platform and medical search engine for healthcare professionals. As of September, there were 1.12 million medical licensed-verified U.S. clinicians, including physicians, nurses, nurse practitioners and physician assistants, using OpenEvidence, the company said.
The company is also quickly scaling its footprint through enterprise partnerships. The company has integrated its generative AI tools into major academic medical centers and health systems, including Mount Sinai Health System, Cedars-Sinai Health System, Penn Medicine, NewYork-Presbyterian and its affiliated medical schools, AdventHealth and, most recently, Northwestern Medicine to embed its platform directly into its EHR.
The company recently reached a $15 billion valuation after a previously unreported $250 million funding round led by Byers Capital and Andreessen Horowitz in early September, Forbes reported last month.
Healthcare providers are rapidly adopting AI tools, and as the technology becomes capable of surfacing and synthesizing medical knowledge within seconds, the role of the clinician shifts toward skills that cannot be automated: first-principles reasoning, clinical and contextual judgment and the human side of patient care, according to the organizations.
The two organizations believe AI’s growing role in medicine requires redesigning both clinical practice and medical education to prepare the next generation of clinicians.
"We are all entering, at an unbelievably fast pace, this new world of education and clinical delivery in an AI era. Our view is that this is going to be deployed and implemented everywhere, and we have the opportunity, and, in my view, also a responsibility as an academic center, to study it, because there are always going to be implications and consequences to new-generation technologies. We have the opportunity to study this and ensure that we continue to produce and maintain a competent physician workforce," Sanjay Desai, M.D., Johns Hopkins Medicine Vice Dean for Education, told Fierce Healthcare in an interview.
Medical schools are incorporating AI into curriculum and developing governance principles to train the next generation of physicians for an AI-augmented healthcare environment.
Johns Hopkins Medicine brings together Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, established in 1893, and the Johns Hopkins Health System. Johns Hopkins, credited with defining the standard for 20th-century medical training, sees an opportunity to shape a new medical education model for the AI era, Desai said.
"People raise concerns about cognitive offloading to these tools. What we want to make sure is that we understand, in this future, what are the competencies that we can actually offload to AI? What are the competencies that physicians will be augmented with AI? And then what are the ones that will be inherently human without AI? And then how do we ensure that, for the competencies that are physician-plus AI or physician alone, how are we mitigating these risks of cognitive offloading? The risk is that you have physicians that finish training and then are in an unsupervised setting where they don't have the competencies that we aspire or expect them to have," Desai said.
He added, “These tools are being deployed at breakneck speed, so how do we conduct the evaluation and experiments to ensure that they are being deployed, implemented and monitored in a way that is effective for what the public expects?"
Working with OpenEvidence, Johns Hopkins will design a medical education model that emphasizes core skills such as pathophysiology, evidence-based medicine, clinical reasoning, diagnosis and patient communication, executives said.
"Johns Hopkins designed modern medical education around a simple idea: that physicians learn medicine at the bedside, grounded in science and reasoning. The arrival of AI, in many ways, invites us back to the bedside with new tools and capabilities we have yet to fully imagine," Desai said.
The partnership puts a spotlight on the role commercial AI vendors could play in shaping medical training.
Daniel Nadler, founder and CEO of OpenEvidence, said the company was not disclosing any commercial arrangements but confirmed the partnership is "at minimum a research and development and product collaboration."
From a medical education perspective, Johns Hopkins views OpenEvidence as an example of the kind of AI tools physicians will increasingly use, rather than as the tool that will dictate its medical education model, Desai noted.
Desai is upbeat on the potential of AI to remove friction from the current educational model. He asserts AI can shift medical education from a one-size-fits-all approach to more personalized learning that can fill gaps in clinical experience and give students more control over their training. AI could tailor instruction to individual needs, track which clinical experiences students have had, identify gaps, supplement them with simulations and then flag learners who may need additional support, he noted.
"It's hard to find a group of people, I think, in the world that are more curious and enjoy learning as much as those that pursue medicine, and this brings the joy back because you can learn in an efficient way, in a fun way," Desai said. He also argues that AI could help medical education shift from a time-based model to a competency-based one, using more effective assessments to determine whether physicians have actually mastered the necessary skills rather than relying on years spent in training.
"The question in front of medicine is not whether AI will change the physician's role — it is who will define that change, and on what principles," Travis Zack, M.D., Ph.D., chief medical officer of OpenEvidence, said in a statement. "We believe the future of medicine should be built, not reacted to, and that it must keep patients at the center. There is no institution better suited to build it with than Johns Hopkins, the birthplace of modern medical education."