OpenEvidence answers clinical questions in natural language with cited, evidence-grounded responses, and it is free and unlimited for verified US healthcare professionals. It holds content licences that a small team simply cannot replicate — NEJM, the JAMA Network, NCCN Guidelines and Cochrane among them — so answers can quote licensed source material with citations. For looking something up, it is excellent, it is free, and a physician evaluating Pogosh as a lookup tool will be disappointed.
FACTS VERIFIED AGAINST OPENEVIDENCE INC. SOURCES · AUGUST 2026We would rather you picked the right tool than picked ours. These lists are meant to be used honestly.
Only rows that can be checked against a public source. Rows where Pogosh CDS is the weaker option are included on purpose.
| Pogosh CDS | OpenEvidence | |
|---|---|---|
| What it returns | Coded orders, routing, escalation, drafted note | A cited, natural-language answer to a clinical question |
| Primary job | Decide what to order next for this patient | Answer a question a clinician asks |
| Licensed premium content | None — presents its own structured guidance | NEJM, JAMA Network, NCCN, Cochrane and others under signed agreements |
| Cost to an individual clinician | $149–299 per month | Free for verified US healthcare professionals |
| Developer API | Yes — documented, evaluation key issued directly | An API Terms of Service exists, but there is no publicly documented, self-serve developer API — no public endpoints, SDK or pricing |
| PHI handling | BAA available | The published API terms bar transmitting PHI through the API |
| Independent validation | None published yet — partner program starting | Not evaluated here |
Verified against OpenEvidence Inc. public sources in August 2026. Where a figure is not published by the vendor we say so rather than estimate. Products change — if something here is out of date or unfair, email signal@gighz.com and we will correct it.
If what you need is to look something up, you probably should not — OpenEvidence is free for verified US clinicians and very good at that job. Pogosh CDS is bought by people who need structured output another system consumes: an EHR that has to place coded orders, a practice that wants the workup and note produced inside the chart, or a developer integrating decision support into a product. That is a different purchase.
An OpenEvidence API Terms of Service exists and governs an OpenEvidence Developer Platform, so it would be wrong to say there is no API. What does not exist publicly is documentation, endpoints, an SDK or pricing that a developer could act on without a commercial conversation. Notably, the published API terms also bar transmitting protected health information through the API.
Yes, and that is a sensible setup. OpenEvidence for the question you want to read an answer to, Pogosh CDS for the orders your chart needs to place. They overlap far less than they appear to.
Paste a real note and judge the reasoning yourself.