OpenEvidence to License ACP Guidance and Annals Content for AI

By Nathan Brooks

OpenEvidence will license evidence-based clinical guidance from the American College of Physicians (ACP) and content from Annals of Internal Medicine for its clinical decision-support AI platform, ACP and OpenEvidence said on November 9, 2026. The agreement covers access at the point of care. The organizations did not disclose license fees, contract duration or a launch date.

Evidence for daily decisions

Under the agreement, OpenEvidence will integrate:

• ACP’s clinical guidelines, guidance statements, practice points and best-practice advice, all developed from available evidence.
• Annals of Internal Medicine content spanning original research, review articles, clinical guidelines and commentary.

ACP and OpenEvidence said the two collections play different roles. ACP converts available evidence into practice guidance, while Annals supplies research, reviews and commentary for physicians examining a question in greater depth.

Annals’ licensed material covers clinical practice, health-care delivery, public health, health-care policy, medical education, ethics and research methodology. ACP’s recommendations translate available evidence into guidance for practice; Annals adds material physicians can consult for deeper analysis.

What changes for physicians?

ACP and OpenEvidence said the integrated material is intended to strengthen physicians’ confidence at the point of care and support patient-centered care. Jan K. Carney, ACP president, framed the arrangement as an extension of ACP’s effort to equip internal-medicine physicians with resources for more efficient and effective practice.

“Having access to trusted, evidence-based clinical guidance from ACP and peer-reviewed content from Annals of Internal Medicine where and when they need it can help physicians make more informed clinical decisions in real time and devote more time and attention to patient care,” Carney said. The arrangement therefore targets workflow, not just content licensing.

Internal medicine at scale

Travis Zack, OpenEvidence’s chief medical officer, said internal medicine is currently the largest specialty on the platform. ACP and OpenEvidence did not disclose the platform’s user or query totals for that specialty.

Zack illustrated the workload with a single clinic session. An internist might move from a heart-failure regimen to a thyroid nodule and then to a drug interaction in a patient taking ten medications. The example showed the range of questions internal-medicine physicians can face during routine practice.

ACP and OpenEvidence reported 163,000 ACP members across internal medicine and its subspecialties. They described ACP as the largest medical specialty organization in the United States. That establishes the scale of the membership whose guidance OpenEvidence will license, although neither organization set an adoption target for the integrated content.

Zack also placed the agreement in a longer institutional history. He said the term evidence-based medicine first appeared in print in an ACP journal in 1991. ACP has spent the decades since turning that idea into guidance internists can act on, he said.

Zack emphasized the citation as part of that workflow: “Bringing ACP’s guidance and Annals of Internal Medicine into OpenEvidence means more of those answers draw on the evidence internists already trust, with the citation right there to check.” For physicians, that makes the citation a check on the answer rather than an optional reference.

The execution test

The practical test is whether the planned integration makes ACP recommendations and Annals articles visible and checkable during routine care. For physicians, the change is a cited evidence layer inside the workflow, not merely more reading. ACP and OpenEvidence said value depends on keeping AI-assisted answers connected to sources physicians can assess for themselves.

The organizations did not specify a go-live date, rollout sequence, technical delivery method or commercial terms. They also did not say whether the licensed content will remain internal-medicine-focused or become available across other specialties.

The next test for OpenEvidence and ACP is whether physicians can find the relevant guidance inside the workflow, check the citation and assess it against the case at hand. If they can, the arrangement can support the more informed clinical decisions and additional patient attention that Carney described. If they cannot, the announced benefits remain unproven.