Best AI for Emergency Medicine: Cited Answers on Shift

Which AI tools do emergency clinicians use?

Emergency physicians, EM residents, ED nurses, physician assistants and students mostly weigh six AI tools, and each one does a different job on shift. AskMed answers clinical questions from journals, guidelines and drug labels, with a link after every claim, for anyone who works or studies in medicine in any country. OpenEvidence is a clinical search engine for healthcare professionals; its App Store listing says an NPI is required and names the American College of Emergency Physicians among its content collaborations. UpToDate Expert AI is the AI companion to the UpToDate clinical reference and answers from UpToDate content. MDCalc is not a chatbot but a decision support app with more than 900 calculators, risk scores and clinical tools, founded by two emergency physicians. ChatGPT for Clinicians is OpenAI's workspace for verified US clinicians, and the general ChatGPT app is not limited to medical sources. AI scribes that write ED notes are a different category and are not covered here.

OpenEvidence

OpenEvidence calls itself a clinical decision support platform and medical search engine. Its US App Store listing says it is available only to healthcare professionals, that an NPI is required and that users must verify their status first. It describes 35 million+ peer-reviewed papers from 300+ journals plus FDA and CDC sources, cites every claim, and lists the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) among its content agreements and collaborations. OpenEvidence's Terms of Use say the service is not available in the European Union, the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area. AskMed vs OpenEvidence compares the two in detail.

UpToDate Expert AI

UpToDate Expert AI is Wolters Kluwer's generative AI companion to the UpToDate clinical reference, announced on September 24, 2025. Its App Store listing says answers are grounded in UpToDate content and linked to supporting sources, and that access needs an UpToDate subscription with Expert AI enabled, through an enterprise account or a personal subscription. Wolters Kluwer says its personal plan with Expert AI, UpToDate Pro Plus, is sold in the United States and Canada as a limited market release. If your hospital already licenses UpToDate, ask whether Expert AI is switched on. AskMed vs UpToDate Expert AI covers the differences.

MDCalc

MDCalc's App Store listing describes 900+ evidence-based calculators, risk scores and clinical tools, offline use, and CME earned by reading the content around many tools. Its About page says MDCalc was founded by two emergency physicians, Dr. Joseph Habboushe and Dr. Graham Walker, and that its content is written by physician experts. The listing does not describe an AI chat feature, so MDCalc sits beside a question-answering tool rather than replacing one.

ChatGPT for Clinicians

OpenAI's help center lists verified clinicians in the United States, namely physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants and pharmacists, as eligible for ChatGPT for Clinicians, checked with an NPI and a license verification. OpenAI says answers draw on peer-reviewed studies, public health guidance and clinical guidelines, with citations that give the title, journal, authors and date. Registered nurses, students and clinicians outside the US are not on that list.

ChatGPT

ChatGPT is OpenAI's general AI chatbot on the web, iPhone and Android. It is useful for talking a topic through or drafting a patient leaflet, but it is not limited to medical sources, so check any clinical claim against a guideline or label first. Is ChatGPT accurate for medical questions? covers what published studies found.

What can AskMed answer in the emergency department?

AskMed answers the clinical questions that come up between patients in the emergency department, and every claim links to the source behind it. Emergencies, such as shock, resuscitation and anaphylaxis, are among the topics people ask AskMed about most. Before writing anything, AskMed searches a fixed list of medical sources: PubMed and the Cochrane Library, journals such as NEJM, The Lancet, JAMA and the American Heart Association journals, guideline bodies such as NICE, WHO, CDC, ESC and IDSA, FDA and DailyMed drug labels, and references such as StatPearls, BMJ Best Practice and the MSD Manual. For management questions, AskMed adds "latest guideline update" to its search, ranks guidelines first and gives the year of each recommendation. Drug answers cover what a medicine is for, how it works, monitoring, side effects and interactions, but never doses. Device settings are not doses, so airway and tube sizes, ventilator settings and chest drain suction pressures come with their numbers when the sources state them.

• Workup questions. Ask for a differential with the can't-miss causes first, or for the first test for each cause. Each answer draws on 8 sources by default, and you can set 3 to 12.
• Guideline checks. Ask what the current guideline says about a presentation and see its year. When guidance has changed, the answer says what changed and since when.
• Drug information without doses. Ask what a drug is for, how it works, what to monitor and which interactions matter. Amounts come from the current label, your formulary or the ED's drug guide.
• Context from a file. Attach a PDF, a photo of printed text such as a lab report or discharge summary, or a pasted note, and AskMed can cite the file for what the file says. Images are read for their text only.
• Follow-ups. A short follow-up such as "and in pregnancy?" is read together with your previous question, and every answer ends with three suggested follow-ups.

Checking a guideline between patients and a night shift with no senior to ask show AskMed used in the gaps of a busy shift.

Which emergency scores can you calculate on getaskmed.com?

getaskmed.com publishes clinical score calculators as web pages, and several of them fit common emergency department questions: chest pain, suspected pulmonary embolism or DVT, sepsis, reduced consciousness, transient ischemic attack, upper GI bleeding, pneumonia and suspected appendicitis. Each calculator is built from the original paper or guideline, links to it by DOI, and lists the score's limits. The calculations run in your browser, and the values you type are not sent anywhere. The calculators are not inside the AskMed iPhone or Android app; they open in any browser on a phone, tablet or computer. They cover fewer scores than MDCalc, whose listing describes 900+ tools, so a rarer score still means opening MDCalc. For the reasoning around a score, such as when PERC applies or how HEART compares with TIMI and GRACE, read the score's guide page or ask AskMed for a cited answer. The table lists the ED scores available today.

Guide pages explain how the scores fit together: PERC vs Wells, HEART vs TIMI vs GRACE, qSOFA vs SIRS and AVPU vs GCS.

How can EM residents and students use AI to study?

Emergency medicine residents and students get the most from AI when each answer explains why, with a source they can open, so a gap found on shift or in a practice question turns into a short cited read. AskMed has no emergency medicine board question bank, so pair AskMed with the question bank your program or school uses and ask AskMed about the questions you miss. Paste a multiple-choice question with its options, and the first sentence of the answer names the correct option, then the answer explains why each other option is wrong, with a citation after each claim. For an evidence question, such as whether a newer approach beats the standard one, Research Mode analyzes up to 20 papers, lays out the key trials, meta-analyses and guideline positions, and says where the evidence is weak or conflicting. Source filters let you limit an answer to clinical guidelines or to meta-analyses and set how many sources it cites, from 3 to 12.

• Review the shift. Write down the questions you couldn't answer during a shift, then ask them afterwards and open the guideline behind each answer.
• Learn the scores from the paper. Each getaskmed.com calculator links to the study that defined it, so you can see where every cut-off comes from.
• Prepare a journal club. Journal club preparation shows Research Mode used on one trial question.
• Share with your team. Send a full answer with its sources to a colleague or classmate as text.

Medical students have their own guide: best AI for medical students, and ED nurses can read best AI for nurses.

How do you use AI safely in the emergency department?

Emergency clinicians use AI safely by treating every answer as a lead to check, and by keeping AI out of the minutes when a patient needs action rather than reading. AskMed is a reference for education, not a symptom checker, and it does not diagnose patients or decide treatment, so in a resuscitation follow your department's protocols, life support algorithms and the senior clinician on duty. AI models can misread a source or state an outdated recommendation with confidence, so open the citation behind the sentence you will act on and check that it covers the same group of patients. Guidance does change: NICE replaced its 2016 sepsis guideline, NG51, with NG253 for people aged 16 or over in November 2025, so the year on a recommendation matters. Take doses only from the current label, your formulary or the ED's drug guide, and keep names and other identifying details out of any AI tool unless your employer has approved it for patient data.

• Open the citation. In AskMed every claim is followed by its own link, and the source list labels each one as a Guideline, Research, Drug label or Reference, so you know what kind of evidence it is before you open it.
• Check the year and the country. UK EDs follow NICE guidance such as NG232 on head injury (May 2023), and local protocols can differ from national or overseas guidance.
• Use Private Mode. With Private Mode on, new questions are not saved to AskMed's History.
• Report what looks wrong. Tap the thumbs down under an answer and pick a reason, such as Inaccurate or Sources don't match, with an optional note.

How AskMed answers lists every source AskMed searches and every limit, and best AI apps for doctors compares tools for clinical questions in general.