Rik Renard, Head of Strategy & Product at Sword Intelligence, shared on LinkedIn:
“After months of watching UpToDate meet ChatGPT clones raise insane amounts of money ($300M+ for OpenEvidence alone) and grow like wildfire, UpToDate finally entered the ring with their own generative AI solution.
I had a conversation with Dr. Peter Bonis, UpToDate’s Chief Medical Officer, before the launch. When I asked why they waited so long, he said: ‘We didn’t want to take shortcuts.’
Thank god.
A few weeks ago in the hospital, I watched a doctor use ChatGPT during patient encounters. What’s concerning is that ChatGPT trains on the entire internet – including a lot of garbage. When doctors get advice from tech trained on random content and modify their clinical thinking based on that… it’s genuinely scary.
When I pressed Dr. Bonis on hallucination mitigation, his most important answer wasn’t about expert contributors (though they have those). It was architectural: their AI only uses UpToDate’s curated content.
That’s it. No internet scraping. No partnerships with dozens of journals. Just decades of the most trusted clinical resource, now conversational.
(The reason I prefer UpToDate over individual studies is that most clinical research is hard to replicate, while UpToDate guidelines go through multiple rounds of expert review)
I’m happy UpToDate finally entered the space. Hopefully they and their two main competitors (Pathways/Doximity and OpenEvidence) keep pushing innovation forward.
PS: Call to action for any investor/builder – please don’t enter this space. The stakes are too high for AI decision support built on shortcuts. As a future patient, I’m asking nicely.”
More posts about AI in Oncology.