OpenEvidence and Penn Medicine Launch Global Clinical AI Partnership

OpenEvidence and Penn Medicine announced a global partnership on September 15, 2026, to bring AI-powered clinical decision support to Penn Medicine’s more than 10,000 clinicians across its seven-hospital health system, with that support also extending to low- and middle-income countries through the Botswana-UPenn Partnership.

Under the agreement, OpenEvidence’s tools will be accessible to clinicians within the campuses of Penn Medicine and the Botswana-UPenn Partnership. The partners describe the deployment as bringing clinicians personalized, evidence-based insights drawn directly from available medical literature and from information pulled from the electronic health record, with the stated goal of delivering the right evidence for the right patient at the right time, embedded within workflow.

OpenEvidence describes itself as the most widely used medical AI and clinical decision-making tool among U.S. physicians and states that, according to independent studies, more American physicians use OpenEvidence than all other AI platforms combined. The company says it is trusted by millions of verified U.S. healthcare professionals, is used daily on average by the majority of U.S. physicians, and is free for all verified U.S. clinicians.

Clinical Decision Support Inside Penn Medicine

Srinath Adusumalli, Vice President and Chief Health Information Officer at the University of Pennsylvania Health System and a cardiologist, said the partnership gives Penn Medicine clinicians, at home and elsewhere, the ability to immediately surface the best available medical evidence in the context of the patient in front of them.

Adusumalli said that integrating AI into more Penn Medicine programs, including the existing Penn Pathways clinical decision support program, electronic consultation programs, and brick-and-mortar and virtual care programs, could expand access to specialized care in meaningful ways. The announcement notes that Penn Medicine places a special focus on underserved communities.

Penn Medicine comprises the University of Pennsylvania Health System and the Perelman School of Medicine, counts more than 49,000 team members, and treats nearly half a million emergency patients annually across seven hospitals in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, according to the announcement.

A Purpose-Built Tool for Botswana

Beyond the U.S. health system deployment, the agreement enables Penn Medicine teams to design a tool from the ground up, built to support the particular considerations of practicing medicine in the region.

“OpenEvidence was founded on the belief that the best available medical evidence should reach every clinician, not only those working inside the world’s best resourced hospitals,” said Travis Zack, Chief Medical Officer at OpenEvidence. He said the company is building and rigorously evaluating such tools with academic partners like Penn Medicine for the varied conditions under which most of the world actually practices medicine.

Farouk Dako, Director of the Botswana-UPenn Partnership and Strategic Advisor for Academic Partnerships at the Perelman School of Medicine’s Center for Global Health, said building a customized set of tools directly with BUP clinicians and partners reflects a shared conviction that effective clinical AI will be shaped by local expertise and adapted to the conditions clinicians practice in. He described the collaboration as a model for extending Penn Medicine’s resources and expertise to lower-resource settings through sustainable partnerships.

The announcement describes the 25-year-old Botswana-UPenn Partnership as one of the longest-running academic health partnerships in sub-Saharan Africa. Working alongside the University of Botswana and the Government of Botswana Ministry of Health, BUP has supported the training of Botswana’s clinicians and researchers, helped establish postgraduate medical education programs, and conducted research on HIV/AIDS, oncology, and population health. Penn has worked in Botswana since 2001 and employs approximately 120 full-time clinical and research staff there, the announcement states.

The Botswana-UPenn Partnership’s 25-Year Record

Penn Medicine recounted the partnership’s origins in a feature published July 7, 2026. According to that account, Penn was invited to provide clinical training support in 2001 after then-President Festus Mogae’s appeal to the United Nations, the same year Botswana became the first country in Africa to offer free HIV care. At the epidemic’s peak, 25 percent of the southern African country’s population was infected, and life expectancy fell from 61 years to 50 between 1986 and 2002, the feature recounts.

The feature states that Botswana’s AIDS-related death rate has fallen by more than 75 percent over the past 25 years, and that, in the population aged 15 to 64, the country has exceeded the UNAIDS 95-95-95 targets: 95 percent of HIV-positive individuals know their status, 98 percent of those are receiving treatment, and 98 percent of people being treated have an undetectable viral load.

Penn’s account also records that its medical students began optional six-week rotations at Botswana’s Princess Marina Hospital in 2004, and that in 2009 Penn assisted the University of Botswana in launching the country’s first medical school to address the shortage of doctors. BUP operates as an office of the University of Pennsylvania in Gaborone, a structure the feature says keeps the program’s funding within the institution; it puts the program’s workforce at 67 employees, with a peak of 140.

Dako, an associate professor of Radiology at Penn Medicine, also described to the feature a new project using artificial intelligence to automate the interpretation of medical imaging and to summarize medical text, and said he foresees telehealth and digital health reaching patients in sparsely populated areas. “Our presence here has not only been for training Penn students and residents who rotate here, but also we’ve contributed to local workforce development,” he said of the program.

The Botswana-UPenn Partnership will mark its 25th anniversary with an academic conference on November 12–13, 2026, in Gaborone, intended to promote regional academic collaboration and global health partnership, according to Penn Medicine.