Miami and Boston — Boston Children’s Hospital and OpenEvidence have launched a multi-year collaboration to examine how clinicians’ use of artificial intelligence tools at the point of care relates to clinical practice patterns and care delivery.
The initiative will combine Boston Children’s clinical expertise with OpenEvidence’s AI-powered clinical decision support platform to evaluate how real-world adoption of the technology may influence physician behavior and broader patterns of care.
The organizations said the analysis will use only aggregated, provider-level information. No patient-level data will be accessed or used.
“This initiative brings together Boston Children’s deep clinical expertise and OpenEvidence’s clinical evidence platform to better understand care delivery and help children thrive, while preserving patient privacy,” said John Brownstein, PhD, Chief Innovation Officer at Boston Children’s Hospital. “OpenEvidence has quickly become a trusted, everyday resource at the point of care, supporting millions of patient visits across the U.S. By analyzing anonymous patterns in how clinicians ask and answer questions during these encounters, we can surface insights into health trends that would otherwise remain hidden—and, in collaboration with OpenEvidence, continue helping clinicians deliver better care.”
OpenEvidence has gained broad adoption in clinical settings, but the companies said relatively little is known about how its use relates to clinical practice patterns at the population level.
The collaboration also includes an integration allowing Boston Children’s clinicians to access OpenEvidence directly through the hospital’s electronic health record system.
“As a pediatrician who trained and practiced at Boston Children’s before joining OpenEvidence, I have watched the tool go from nonexistent to indispensable among my colleagues in a remarkably short period of time,” said Mondira Ray, MD, MBI, Senior Vice President of Clinical Informatics at OpenEvidence. “OpenEvidence has become part of how clinicians practice. A change this visible carries implications we are eager to examine.”
Boston Children’s Hospital is a pediatric teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School and operates a research enterprise with about 3,000 researchers and scientific staff. The hospital is a 491-bed comprehensive pediatric and adolescent health care center.
Boston Children’s also operates nine satellite locations and the Martha Eliot Health Center and provides around-the-clock pediatric care at Beverly Hospital, Winchester Hospital, St. Luke’s Hospital, South Shore Hospital and Cape Cod Hospital.
Its broader network includes an affiliation with Franciscan Children’s Hospital, the Boston Children’s Primary Care Alliance, the Pediatric Physicians’ Organization at Boston Children’s Hospital and Boston Children’s Health Physicians.
