Conference Presentation, Interview, Fireside Chat
Daniel Nadler on Building an AI-Powered Search Engine for Medicine
- The volume of medical literature is predicted to double approximately every 30 days, creating an information gap that has caused patients to receive frontier knowledge delayed by 17 years, a lag the speaker intends to reduce to 17 hours so physicians can instantly understand FDA-approved drugs by the following morning.
- Current clinical practice exhibits significant variance, with 88% of second opinions changing the initial diagnosis and one in five completely overturning it, while only 12% of second opinions match the first or reverse it, leading to a mission to eliminate unwanted variance where a 5% to 10% margin for reasonable disagreement remains acceptable.
- Open Evidence has recently processed 1.5 million license-verified queries in the United States, with a forecast that 300 million Americans will receive treatment from physicians using the tool this year, though usage is currently skewed toward complex specialties like cancer, Alzheimer's, and neurodegenerative diseases while under-indexing family physicians.
- The platform operates as a source search engine providing access to full-text Phase 3 RCTs and detailed data such as progression-free survival decay curves, aiming to solve hallucinations and answer theft found in large language models trained on abstracts, with plans to offer a consortium model for AI partners to address potential "right to learn" assertions.
- Addressing clinical trial inefficiencies where one in three trials discontinue due to patient recruitment and fewer than 10% of eligible cancer patients find relevant trials, the strategy includes matching supply and demand in trials to utilize the $50 billion annually spent on trial execution.
- Future plans involve creating an "MRI of medical knowledge" to enable full-body scanning of medical data at the point of care, with the ultimate goal of removing medical error from the top 10 causes of death in the United States while establishing a career-long commitment to philanthropy through business building rather than liquidation.