The Heart of Healthcare | A Digital Health Podcast

How a Small Team Built the Fastest-Growing Clinician App Ever | OpenEvidence Co-founder & CTO Zack Ziegler

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Nov 17, 2025

Zachary Ziegler, Co-founder and CTO of OpenEvidence, shares insights on building the fastest-growing physician app, now reaching 40% of U.S. doctors. He discusses how his PhD research in AI led to innovations that aid clinical decision-making without replacing physician judgment. Ziegler reveals their unique strategy of direct distribution to clinicians and the app's impressive growth statistics, including 17 million monthly queries. He also introduces the 'Deep Consult' feature designed for enhanced patient care while addressing the challenges of clinician workload.

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INSIGHT

AI Meets Medical Complexity

Zachary Ziegler connected large language model research to the complexity of medical knowledge after his brother-in-law's leukemia experience.
He saw AI as a way to close the gap between written medical knowledge and frontline clinicians' needs.

ANECDOTE

Started With WebMD, Pivoted To Doctors

Early on Ziegler considered building a consumer WebMD-like product to answer what the science actually says.
He pivoted toward clinicians because the information problem is far more acute for providers than consumers.

INSIGHT

Bottom-Up Growth From Usefulness

OpenEvidence grew organically by shipping a useful product directly to clinicians and iterating from real user feedback.
That bottom-up approach reached over 40% of U.S. clinicians and 17 million monthly queries.

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On the heels of raising $210 million at a $6 billion valuation, OpenEvidence is the fastest-growing physician app in history, now reaching over 40% of U.S. physicians and powering 17 million monthly clinical queries.

In this conversation, co-founder and CTO Zack Ziegler shares how his background in early large language models led him to build an AI that helps clinicians make better decisions at the point of care, without replacing their judgment.

We cover:

🧠 The strategies Open Evidence used to reach 40% of U.S. clinicians in a short time

💡 The unexpected reason they chose to go direct to doctors instead of via their employers

💰 How they make money

⚙️ What “Deep Consult” means for the future of clinical decision-making

🏥 Whether tools like this could ever—or should ever—be available to patients

About our guest:

Zachary Ziegler is the cofounder and CTO of OpenEvidence, the leading medical information platform. Designed from the ground up for medical professionals, OpenEvidence organizes and expands the world's medical knowledge to make it more useful, open, accessible, and understandable. Launched out of the Mayo Clinic Platform Accelerate, OpenEvidence has become the most rapidly adopted tool by physicians in history, now used by over 40% of US physicians in over 15,000 care centers across the United States. Before founding OpenEvidence, Ziegler was a PhD student at Harvard University, where he worked with Professor Sasha Rush and was awarded the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. He completed his undergraduate studies at Cornell University, where he received the Barry Goldwater Scholarship.

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🙏Thank you to our show sponsor, LookDeep. LookDeep pioneers AI that can see, hear, and respond with care to help hospitals be Ever Present for Every Patient. Learn more at lookdeep.ai/aimee.

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