The University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) and OpenEvidence today announced a collaboration that brings evidence-based artificial intelligence directly into clinicians’ everyday workflows, giving UTMB physicians and other clinical users secure access to cited medical evidence from within the electronic health record.
The integration, which went live at UTMB in March, was developed to give clinicians access to AI-enabled information resources within existing clinical workflows.
OpenEvidence is embedded within the UTMB electronic health record environment. Clinicians access the platform using their standard UTMB enterprise credentials. Rather than requiring clinicians to move between separate applications or create additional accounts, the integration brings OpenEvidence directly into existing clinical workflows while maintaining enterprise security standards.
Once authenticated, clinicians can ask clinical questions in natural language and receive responses that include citations to medical literature, clinical guidelines, and other authoritative sources. The approach combines the accessibility of generative AI with the evidence orientation required for clinical decision-making.
Since the March launch, UTMB has seen strong growth in both the number of clinicians using OpenEvidence and the volume of clinical queries submitted through the platform. Today, more than half of UTMB clinicians actively use OpenEvidence for clinical decision support. Adoption data indicate that many clinicians have incorporated the tool into their daily workflows.
“Healthcare has no shortage of promising AI tools. The harder challenge is making those tools genuinely usable in clinical practice while maintaining the security, governance, and trust that healthcare requires,” said Peter McCaffrey, MD, MS, FCAP, vice president and chief digital and AI officer at UTMB.
“Our implementation of OpenEvidence provides clinicians with access to AI-generated information that includes citations to medical literature and guidelines. The growth in utilization since launch suggests that when you remove friction and put useful AI where clinicians actually work, they use it.”
With hospitals located on four campuses in addition to more than 100 clinics across Southeast Texas, the geographic reach of UTMB makes rapid access to current medical knowledge particularly valuable. Clinicians across the UTMB network can access the same evidence-based AI capabilities regardless of their location.
“UTMB has approached AI deployment with a clear understanding that successful clinical technology has to fit naturally into the way clinicians already work,” said Travis Zack, MD, PhD, chief medical officer at OpenEvidence. “By integrating OpenEvidence into the clinical environment and simplifying secure access, UTMB is demonstrating how health systems can move evidence-based AI from an interesting technology to an everyday clinical capability.”
The OpenEvidence implementation is part of a broader strategy at UTMB to responsibly integrate AI into healthcare delivery. Rather than treating AI as a collection of standalone applications, UTMB is working to establish an enterprise environment where validated AI capabilities can be securely incorporated into clinical and operational workflows, appropriately governed, and evaluated based on their real-world use and impact.
For UTMB, the OpenEvidence deployment also represents an opportunity to better understand how clinicians interact with a new generation of AI-enabled knowledge tools at scale. As adoption grows, UTMB will continue evaluating utilization, clinician experience, and opportunities to improve how evidence and clinical intelligence are delivered at the point of care.