AI and Patient Centered Care?

Patient or Person-Centered Healthcare?

Patient-centered or person-centered healthcare. What originally started as an aspirational framework for improving care has unfortunately evolved into one of the most overused phrases in healthcare marketing. Everyone is now “patient-centered”—even the venture capitalist who believes their pursuit of billion‑dollar returns represents patient-centered care at its finest. And herein lies the problem: what is authentically patient-centered care versus just another business opportunity in a $4 trillion industry?

Despite what this opening paragraph might suggest, I am not the authority on what is or is not patient-centered care. That is not why I am writing this post.

If you are a genuine practitioner or proponent of patient- or person-centered healthcare, you already understand something essential: my opinion as a patient and advocate is expert-level. Patients like me are experts too, and we belong at the decision‑making table. That belief is precisely why I am writing this. Patient-centered care does not belong in a marketing department. It is not a label or a business model—it is my quality of life. It is time to give this term back to patients, where it belongs.

OpenEvidence

Earlier this week, I was reading a post from Health Tech Nerds about one of the largest healthcare artificial intelligence (AI) companies, OpenEvidence. If you are unfamiliar with Health Tech Nerds, their stated purpose is to provide analysis of major headlines impacting healthcare across business, technology, and policy. As a patient advocate, I operate from a more ideological plane, while their perspective is unapologetically business‑focused. That said, I still find their work informative and worth engaging.

Founded in 2022 by Daniel Nadler and Zachary Ziegler, OpenEvidence was created to address the overwhelming volume of medical research that makes it increasingly difficult for doctors and other clinicians to stay current with the latest evidence. Their idea was to streamline access to high‑quality medical knowledge by combining advanced AI with trusted scientific sources. By doing so, OpenEvidence aims to help clinicians cut through the noise of traditional research tools—and yes, even “Dr. Google.”

According to the company, OpenEvidence’s core mission is to organize and expand the world’s collective medical knowledge by providing free, instant access at the point of care. On the surface, this certainly sounds patient-centered. Rapid, evidence‑based insights that synthesize research across disciplines could help bridge the gap between academic medicine and real‑world clinical practice. This mission has attracted major investors such as Sequoia Capital, Google Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins, and has driven adoption across thousands of U.S. hospitals and clinics.

Today, OpenEvidence is valued at approximately $12 billion, following a recent $250 million funding round. Its valuation reportedly doubled within months—an impressive achievement by any venture capital metric.

OpenEvidence’s Business Model

At first glance, OpenEvidence appears to embody the kind of patient-centered innovation many of us hope for. With so much of my quality of life dependent on my medical team’s access to and understanding of current scientific evidence, a free tool that improves that access is exactly the kind of problem AI should be solving. But as is often the case in healthcare, the devil is in the details.

OpenEvidence generates revenue from the healthcare and pharmaceutical advertising market, which totals roughly $44.5 billion annually. In practical terms, this means pharmaceutical companies pay OpenEvidence to market directly to physicians and other providers while they are using the platform.

Pharmaceutical advertising already plays an outsized role in U.S. healthcare. There are approximately 1.1 million clinicians in the United States with prescribing authority, including physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants. In 2025, pharmaceutical companies were projected to spend roughly $39 billion on advertising—nearly 88 percent of all healthcare advertising. That translates to tens of thousands of dollars per prescriber, per year.

Is OpenEvidence Patient-Centered?

The short answer is no.

This is not a moral judgment of marketing professionals, nor is it an attack on doctors. Marketing departments do not exist to improve my quality of life; they exist to influence purchasing behavior and generate returns for investors. Regardless of mission statements or core values, investor return ultimately shapes how companies behave.

In OpenEvidence’s case, the pressure is to continuously monetize access to clinicians within a volatile, $39‑billion advertising ecosystem. When markets shift—whether due to a pandemic, political upheaval, or economic instability—investors expect protection from risk. When investors become uncomfortable, prices rise or business models change, often rapidly.

This creates real tension between advertising, evidence‑based medicine, and patient well‑being. These forces do not naturally coexist. Physicians are expected to navigate them carefully, but billions of advertising dollars inevitably influence which treatments are emphasized, discussed, or normalized.

If OpenEvidence were to lose pharmaceutical advertising revenue, it is reasonable to assume the platform would eventually charge clinicians for access. Those costs would not disappear; they would be passed on to patients. Even small increases in healthcare costs can prevent people from accessing necessary care.

Conclusion

AI is a tool—nothing more, nothing less. And today, it has never been more important to pay attention to how healthcare language is used.

Terms like “patient-centered” and “person-centered” are increasingly deployed to mask profit motives rather than reflect patient priorities. Yes, this is capitalism. I am writing this post on an expensive laptop because investors once believed Apple could generate returns.

The difference is choice. As someone who suffers from chronic pain due to issues like rheumatoid arthritis, I do not have any choice. I could have purchased a less expensive computer and still written this post. In healthcare, that choice often does not exist.

Patient-centered care is not defined by convenience, adoption rates, or valuation. It is defined by who bears the risk when incentives collide.

If AI tools in healthcare are funded by advertising that benefits third parties more than patients, then we should stop calling them patient-centered. They may still be useful. They may still be innovative. But honesty matters—especially when the cost of dishonesty is measured in pain.