On 27 April 2026, OpenEvidence became unavailable in the European Union and the United Kingdom. The company cited mounting regulatory uncertainty, including the EU Artificial Intelligence Act. A subsequent commentary in The Lancet Regional Health - Europe described the event as a warning about the need for clearer medical-AI governance.
The immediate problem for clinicians is practical rather than political. OpenEvidence had made a fast, cited response to a clinical question feel normal. Published reporting described roughly 18 million clinical consultations each month before the withdrawal. The questions that created that habit still arise on rounds, in clinics, and during research.
What European clinicians lost
The useful part of the experience was not simply an answer generated by a language model. It was the combination of retrieval, readable synthesis, and references that a clinician could inspect. When that combination disappears, users may fall back to general-purpose chatbots that are not designed to show where a medical claim came from.
Six questions to ask any replacement
Several products now describe themselves as alternatives for European users, CliniAtlas included. The following checklist is more useful than a feature comparison:
- Can you open and inspect the source behind a material claim?
- Does the interface distinguish guidelines, regulatory records, reviews, trials, and preliminary evidence?
- Does retrieval include European regulatory sources and guidelines where they are relevant?
- Where are application workloads and stored user data hosted?
- Is the intended-use boundary stated clearly, especially for patient-specific questions?
- Can the system abstain or expose limitations when retrieval is weak?
Where CliniAtlas fits
CliniAtlas is built in Split, Croatia, in collaboration with the University of Split School of Medicine. The application, language-model inference, and stored service data run in AWS eu-central-1 in Frankfurt. On-demand searches call public evidence services including PubMed and Europe PMC, and the product also uses curated European guideline and EMA medicine registries.
Answers are designed around inspectable citations and a reference panel that labels source type and evidence stratum. The product works in English and Croatian today. It is intended for literature search, education, and professional evidence review, not diagnosis or patient-specific treatment selection.
CliniAtlas is younger than the platform Europe lost, and we do not present an early product as settled clinical infrastructure. Our aim is narrower: build a transparent evidence workspace for European professionals, measure it honestly, and improve it with clinical and academic partners.