OpenEvidence and the Medical Identification Number for Canada Corporation (MINC) announced a partnership on September 11, 2026 that lets Canadian physicians verify their identity with a MINC number and keep free access to the company's medical AI platform. The MINC is already held by more than 95% of physicians in Canada, according to the announcement, so the check relies on an identifier most clinicians already have rather than a new registration process.
How the verification works
The integration is deliberately narrow. A Canadian physician either enters a MINC at registration or links it to an existing OpenEvidence account, and the organizations say this preserves no-cost access while keeping verification and privacy controls in place. The announcement, datelined Miami, FL and Ottawa, ON, frames the arrangement as a way to cut friction at the moment of sign-up. MINCpartnered with OpenEvidence in recognition of the platform's effect on clinical practice and patient care, and both sides describe the collaboration as a significant milestone.
OpenEvidence says the platform has handled more than 500 million AI-powered clinical consultations from verified healthcare professionals worldwide. It describes itself as a medical information platform built for clinicians, offering point-of-care answers grounded in peer-reviewed medical literature with references clinicians can review and verify. The company says the platform is already used by more than 50% of physicians in Canada and trusted by more than one million physicians worldwide, and it cites content partnerships with The New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association, Cochrane, and Nature.
What a MINC is matters for how the check behaves. A MINC is issued to anyone who consents in writing at their first, even temporary, entry into any part of the Canadian medical education or practice system, including undergraduate students, postgraduate trainees, applicants to MCC examinations, and physicians of any registration status. Once assigned, it stays unchanged for a medical career, is never reused even after the individual's death, and remains with people who leave Canada and return, move between jurisdictions, or change registration status. No information is encoded in it beyond a country code, CA for Canada, and a profession code, MD for Medicine, and the number implies no special privilege, rights, or status.
MINCis a federally incorporated not-for-profit founded and supported by the Federation of Medical Regulatory Authorities of Canada and the Medical Council of Canada, which incorporated the corporation solely to administer MINC, according to Medical Council of Canada documentation. With an individual's consent, the Medical Council of Canada or a provincial or territorial medical regulatory authority submits Core Information covering names, gender, date of birth, country of birth, and year and university of graduation, which MINCuses to generate or confirm a MINC. Not-for-profit and public sector organizations in physician education, certification, licensure, or professional practice may apply for a license to use the system, and licensees must comply with MINC's Privacy Code and applicable privacy legislation. The Medical Council of Canada and the twelve Canadian medical regulatory authorities hold controlled access to MINCs and Core Information, while Licensed Users receive only the MINCs of their own members.
What this means for business
For companies selling software to clinicians, the deal shows a verification route that does not require building identity checks from scratch. OpenEvidence is free for all verified U. S. clinicians, and the company calls itself the most popular AI for doctors in the United States, citing independent studies it says find that more American physicians use OpenEvidence than all other AI platforms combined. Extending the same free model to Canada through an existing national identifier keeps the cost of onboarding low and gives the vendor a defensible answer when hospital procurement teams ask how users are authenticated.
The limits are worth stating plainly. MINC verification confirms that a user is a physician in the Canadian system; it says nothing about how accurate any given answer is, and OpenEvidence's own description rests on cited, peer-reviewed sources rather than on regulatory approval. The MINC program is endorsed by all Canadian medical regulatory authorities as a primary means of identifying the individuals they register, and the system adheres to the Canadian Standards Association Model Code for the Protection of Personal Information, but access to the underlying Core Information stays with the Medical Council of Canada and the twelve regulatory authorities. A clinic evaluating the platform should ask which data leaves its systems, who can see the verification record, and what happens to access if a physician changes registration status or moves between provinces.
Daniel Nadler, Founder and CEO of OpenEvidence, said he grew up in Toronto and that keeping the platform free for Canadian physicians is personal for him, adding that MINC is the common identifier across Canadian medicine and that connecting it makes verification faster. Michael Epp, Executive Director of MINC, said his organization supports initiatives that advance evidence-based healthcare delivery in Canada and that MINC's identification infrastructure can help facilitate access to evidence-based medical information. The marker to watch is whether the share of Canadian physicians on the platform moves above the current 50% over the next year; a clear rise would show that identity checks, not features, were the main barrier to adoption.
