The Pulse
OpenEvidence Goes Live in Northwestern Medicine’s Epic EHR
Northwestern Medicine and OpenEvidence announced an enterprise-wide collaboration to put the medical search and clinical decision-support platform inside Epic. Clinicians, nurses and pharmacists can use it to check drug information and revi
AI.info Team · Written with AI ·
“Embedding OpenEvidence within Northwestern Medicine’s EHR delivers real-time, evidence-based insights without adding complexity.”
Ania Bilski, MD, Vice President Clinical AI at OpenEvidence
Northwestern Medicine and OpenEvidence announced an enterprise-wide collaboration on October 12 to put the clinical search platform directly inside Epic, Northwestern’s electronic health record. The rollout began October 8, letting clinicians open the service from Epic and sign in with their existing hospital credentials.
OpenEvidence opens from Epic
The integration gives physicians, advanced practice providers, nurses, pharmacists and other clinical staff access from the EHR, rather than requiring a separate sign-in to reach the service. Northwestern Medicine’s September 24 notice to clinicians says users can find it in Epic’s menu or the “More activities” menu while charting. Physicians and advanced practice providers need an NPI, the notice says.
The health system says staff can use OpenEvidence to check medication dosing and drug interactions, review guidelines and get answers with citations to peer-reviewed literature. The announcement names content from the New England Journal of Medicine and the JAMA Network among the sources clinicians can consult. It presents the tool as clinical search and decision support, not as an automated diagnosis or treatment system.
A broader group of clinical users
Northwestern Medicine says the deployment extends access beyond physicians to nurses, pharmacists and other members of the care team. The internal rollout notice specifically lists physicians, advanced practice providers, nurses and pharmacists. It also explains how existing users can connect their accounts: history syncs inside Epic only when the OpenEvidence profile uses an nm.org email address.
That reach across roles is a notable part of the deployment. The announcement frames the service as a shared way for care teams to look up evidence and medication information in the course of work, rather than a tool limited to individual physicians. It does not describe a change to who makes clinical decisions.
Northwestern’s guidance puts judgment with clinicians
The clinician notice instructs users to provide protected health information only when necessary to find relevant information and to apply clinical judgment to information they access online. Those instructions sit alongside the integration’s promise of automatic sign-in through hospital credentials. The announcement does not specify what patient-chart data, if any, OpenEvidence receives automatically when a clinician opens it.
For clinicians who already use the service with a different email address, Northwestern’s notice set October 7 as the deadline to update account settings if they wanted their history to appear in Epic. Users who did not want that history displayed were told to switch to a non-Northwestern email address. The guidance makes account linking and user choices part of the deployment, not just a background technical detail.
The first phase has no reported outcome measures
Northwestern Medicine describes the enterprise rollout as the first phase of a broader collaboration focused on using AI safely and effectively at the bedside. James Adams, MD, the health system’s chief medical officer, said the priority in evaluating new technology is that it address clinical needs and scale across the system. OpenEvidence senior vice president of strategic partnerships Vivien Ho said the organizations intend to keep working on clinical workflows across care teams.
The announcement provides no figures on user uptake, time saved, clinical outcomes or error reduction, and it does not detail an evaluation plan. For now, the concrete change is access: eligible Northwestern staff can launch OpenEvidence from Epic to review cited medical evidence and medication information while working in the EHR.