A New Operating System for Physicians with OpenEvidence Founder Daniel Nadler
Timestamps are as accurate as they can be but may be slightly off. We encourage you to listen to the full context.
Podcast Summary
In this compelling episode, Daniel, founder of Open Evidence, reveals how his company achieved unprecedented adoption by treating physicians like consumers rather than healthcare system appendages. He unpacks the transformation of clinical decision-making through semantic search (02:00), where complex patient scenarios requiring paragraph-long queries can now surface exact snippets from 35 million biomedical publications. The conversation explores how Open Evidence became the clinical knowledge operating system for 40% of US doctors daily (08:01), delivering 20x more usage than competing platforms by establishing the right social contract—positioning itself as a search engine routing to authoritative sources rather than an answer engine. Beyond the technical breakthrough, Daniel shares provocative insights on motivation-driven entrepreneurship (40:18) and why analyzing your propulsion system can actually destroy it, offering a contrarian philosophy for ambitious professionals seeking to build something transformative.
Speakers
Daniel Levine
Founder and CEO of OpenEvidence, the clinical decision support platform used daily by 40% of doctors in the United States. Previously built and sold his first company Kensho (acquired by S&P Global), bringing his consumer internet expertise to healthcare knowledge workers.
Alex Rivera (Host)
Co-host of No Priors podcast, exploring the intersection of AI and ambitious professionals. Former product leader with deep experience in technology and consumer internet companies.
Key Takeaways
Treat Knowledge Workers Like Consumers
Break through industry gatekeepers by addressing professionals directly as consumers. Open Evidence bypassed hospital purchasing committees by creating a free app for doctors' personal phones. This "consumer internet company masquerading as a healthcare company" approach achieved 20x more usage than competitors by treating physicians as people who could download and use tools independently. (12:54)
Build Search, Not Answer Engines
Position your AI tool as routing users to authoritative sources rather than providing definitive answers. Open Evidence became "one of the largest sources of referral traffic to the New England Journal of Medicine after Google" because it framed itself as search within the continuum of Google, not as an oracle. This social contract builds trust with high-stakes professionals who need to verify and audit information. (08:40)
Target Semantic Complexity, Not Keyword Simplicity
Dominate markets where traditional search fails by solving semantic understanding problems. The example of a 44-year-old female with psoriasis and MS illustrates queries too complex for Google but critical for professionals. When your search query requires "many sentences" to describe, you've found a defensible AI application space. (02:11)
Find Compulsive Motivation Over Rational Ideas
Recruit and cultivate team members driven by internal propulsion systems rather than external motivation techniques. Seek people with "an unbelievable amount of aggression" or those proving someone wrong from childhood trauma. Resist analyzing your own motivation sources—in analyzing something, you kill it. Focus on finding those who are "driven on their own warpath" where management becomes about getting out of their way. (40:18)
Embrace Continuing Education as Primary Education
Prepare for knowledge work industries where learning accelerates exponentially. Medical knowledge now doubles every 5 years in top quartile publications, requiring physicians to spend theoretically 9 hours daily just reading literature in their specialty. The future belongs to professionals who invert traditional front-loaded education models, making continuous learning the majority of their professional development rather than a ceremonial afterthought. (23:18)
Statistics & Facts
- OpenEvidence is used approximately 20 times more than the next most used platform in high stakes clinical decision support for doctors. (00:57)
- 40% of doctors in The United States use OpenEvidence daily on average. (08:01)
- The rate of doubling of medical knowledge was every 50 years in 1950, but today it's every 73 days according to estimates in the British Medical Journal and Nature. Even using a conservative methodology looking only at the top quartile of peer reviewed medical literature, it doubles every 5 years. (23:11)
