Table of Contents
Boston Children’s Hospital and OpenEvidence have launched a multiyear collaboration, an OpenEvidence clinical practice study, to study how clinicians’ point-of-care use of AI tools relates to clinical practice patterns and care delivery.
What the OpenEvidence Clinical Practice Study Will Examine
The project, unveiled July 16, will analyze aggregated, provider-level data to identify links between OpenEvidence use and real-world practice at a population scale; the teams will not access or use patient-level data. This design choice keeps the research focused on prescribing and clinical decision-making patterns across large groups of clinicians, rather than examining any individual patient’s care.
An EHR Integration Alongside the Research
The collaboration also includes an integration giving Boston Children’s clinicians access to OpenEvidence directly within the electronic health record, meaning the research effort is paired with expanded day-to-day access to the tool for the hospital’s own clinical staff.
Why Boston Children’s Sees Value in This OpenEvidence Clinical Practice Study
“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,” Boston Children’s Chief Innovation Officer John Brownstein, PhD, said in a July 17 news release. He stated that OpenEvidence has become “a trusted, everyday resource at the point of care, supporting millions of patient visits across the U.S.”
A Perspective From Someone Who’s Seen the Shift Firsthand
Mondira Ray, MD, senior vice president of clinical informatics at OpenEvidence and a former Boston Children’s pediatrician, said in the release that she has watched the tool “go from nonexistent to indispensable” among former colleagues. Her dual perspective, as both a former practicing pediatrician at Boston Children’s and now a clinical informatics leader at OpenEvidence, offers a useful bridge between the hospital’s clinical priorities and the platform’s research goals.
Why Studying AI’s Effect on Practice Patterns Matters
This kind of population-scale research addresses a question that individual case studies and smaller clinical trials often can’t answer: how does routine, point-of-care AI use actually shift clinical decision-making across a large group of practicing clinicians over time? Rather than measuring AI performance on isolated test questions, the OpenEvidence clinical practice study aims to observe real-world behavior change at scale, which could reveal patterns that smaller, more controlled studies would miss.
Building on OpenEvidence’s Broad Adoption
OpenEvidence has grown rapidly among physicians nationwide as a point-of-care clinical evidence tool, and Boston Children’s own reported experience with AI tools, including significant efficiency gains from prior AI initiatives, suggests the health system has an established track record of measuring and reporting on AI’s operational impact. That institutional experience likely informed the decision to pursue this deeper, population-level research collaboration.
What Privacy Safeguards Are Built Into the Study
By limiting the analysis to aggregated, provider-level data rather than patient-level information, Boston Children’s and OpenEvidence are structuring the OpenEvidence clinical practice study to sidestep many of the privacy and consent complexities that would accompany research using individual patient records. This approach reflects a broader pattern among health systems pursuing AI research: prioritizing population-level insights that can inform policy and practice without requiring access to identifiable patient information.
What Makes This Collaboration Notable
Pairing a research study with an active EHR integration is a notable structural choice, since it means the research team will have an expanding, real-time dataset to study as adoption grows within Boston Children’s own clinical staff, rather than relying solely on external or historical usage data.
What Comes Next for the OpenEvidence Clinical Practice Study
As this multiyear collaboration progresses, the findings could offer some of the first population-scale evidence on how AI tools actually change clinical practice patterns in a major academic pediatric hospital, information that could inform how other health systems approach similar AI integrations. Given the growing national reliance on OpenEvidence at the point of care, the results of this OpenEvidence clinical practice study may carry relevance well beyond Boston Children’s own walls, potentially shaping how the broader industry understands AI’s real-world effect on clinical decision-making.
For more healthcare industry updates, insights and news, visit DistilINFO. Click here to subscribe to stay informed.
