The American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO) is kicking off a strategic partnership with medical artificial intelligence (AI) platform OpenEvidence to integrate—and make widely accessible—key clinical guidelines.
First, let’s get a look at OpenEvidence.
Launched in 2021 and backed by investors, OpenEvidence is referred to as the “most widely used medical AI platform among U.S. physicians.”
What it is: An AI “copilot” tool built for healthcare professionals to provide answers based on peer-reviewed research from credible clinical sources, helping them make “high-stakes decisions at the point of care.”
- To date: The platform has reportedly supported +200 million AI-powered clinical consultations from U.S. physicians and other frontline clinicians.
Any recent upgrades to be aware of?
Yes! Earlier this year, the AI tool expanded with an “AI-Integrated Doctor Dialer” that operates as a communications suite for doctor-patient telemedicine calls, messaging, faxing, and straight-to-voicemail outreach.
- And prior to this: OpenEvidence Visits launched in August 2025 as a personal digital clinical assistant for patient visits that delivers real-time evidence and helps draft clinician notes.
Check out other recent coverage on the platforms’ integration into electronic health record (EHR) workflows—and last month’s feature by NBC News, in which the “chatbot” service said it was used by an estimated 65% of U.S. doctors across nearly 27 million clinical encounters in April alone.
Nice! Now, you mentioned it uses “credible clinical sources” …
Indeed. The platform is an “official AI partner” (or collaborator) of organizations and peer-reviewed journals such as:
- The New England Journal of Medicine
- JAMA and JAMA Network
- National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN)
- Cochrane Systematic Reviews
What this means: OpenEvidence’s content sourced from these partners includes figures, tables, multimedia, full-text clinical findings, and—in the instance of NCCN (a collaborator)— the NCCN Guidelines Treatment Algorithms.
Any other notable partnerships?
Indeed. In fact, the AI tool is no stranger to partnering with national organizations—check out its other society partners here.
So if this is used by clinicians, what type of compliance does it come with?
Notably, OpenEvidence presents itself as HIPAA compliant.
And on the security front: It's reportedly certified as SOC Type II to protect users' data (see here for background on this form of information security compliance).
Alrighty, I’m updated on the tool—let’s talk about this AAO partnership.
The purpose behind this new collaboration is to directly integrate the following AAO guidelines into the OpenEvidence platform:
- Preferred Practice Pattern (PPP) Guidelines: evidence-based, peer-reviewed clinical recommendations; designed to identify characteristics of high-quality eye care based on best available scientific data, establishing clinical benchmarks for detecting, diagnosing, and managing specific ocular diseases
- Ophthalmic Technology Assessments (OTAs): evidence-based clinical reviews published in the AAO’s Ophthalmology journal; designed to evaluate the safety, efficacy, and appropriate clinical use of new ophthalmic drugs, devices, and diagnostic procedures
- See here for a look
Will the AAO still maintain control over this material?
In short: yes.
Per the AAO, this integration will operate as more of a “license of the Academy’s content,” in which the organization will maintain its independence—as well as sole intellectual and financial responsibility— in developing the PPP guidelines and OTAs.
Tell me more.
In addition to this incorporation into OpenEvidence’s model, the AI tool will also share key data with the AAO—including the most-searched topics by ophthalmologists as well as where current clinical guidelines may be lacking.
And speaking of clinical data: OpenEvidence was actually included in recent research published in Eye in which the platform was compared to other large-language models (LLMs) for its performance in ophthalmology. See how it performed.
So … how will this integration benefit the ophthalmic community?
The guidelines’ integration into OpenEvidence will be accessible to ophthalmologists alongside the tool’s pre-existing peer-reviewed medical literature.
- And most importantly: They’ll be available at no cost.
And for the AAO?
This integration helps organizations in prioritizing future content development, ensuring its clinical resources are “remaining responsive to how ophthalmologists actually practice.”
See here for the AAO’s reasoning behind choosing OpenEvidence as a partner (hint: it involves creating a “feedback loop” between how ophthalmologists currently practice and identifying gaps in clinical care).