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Elsevier has announced major content and technology enhancements to ClinicalKey AI, its flagship clinical decision support tool, in response to growing clinician demand for transparency, security, and quality assurance in medical AI tools. The updates come as clinicians face increasing strain in capacity-constrained and pressurized healthcare environments. The announcement frames the expansion around strengthening trust in artificial intelligence at the point of care.

ClinicalKey AI now includes full-text content from premium journals and medical organizations including The Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), the European Society For Medical Oncology, and the American College of Cardiology. The release describes the update as providing the broadest collection of trusted, evidence-based medical content in a clinical AI solution. The expansion also includes full-text content and clinical practice guidelines from leading medical organizations.

Technology enhancements support Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance and are designed to provide clinicians and healthcare institutions with added security and transparency while using the solution. The release notes that artificial intelligence use in healthcare doubled in 2025, but only 40% of clinicians trusted it, according to Elsevier’s Clinician of the Future Report 2025. The question, as presented in the announcement, has shifted from whether artificial intelligence can help clinicians to whether clinicians can trust artificial intelligence.

ClinicalKey AI includes new real-time verification steps intended to drive accuracy by enabling clinicians to trace the exact evidence used to generate an answer. Responses are traceable not only to a source document, but to the exact paragraph from which the citation originates. The release describes this traceability as providing transparency and reassurance for clinicians using the tool.

The platform incorporates a “clinician-in-the-loop” approach supported by a rigorous evaluation framework intended to ensure high-quality insights. Clinicians can access copyright-cleared answers based on peer-reviewed full-text articles from more than 1,000 medical journals. ClinicalKey AI content is updated every 24 hours and converted into structured and linked data so responses are precise and relevant in real-world clinical settings.

ClinicalKey AI is currently in use in more than 300 hospitals worldwide. The expanded content includes:

• More than 130 curated full-text premium journals, including The Lancet series, New England Journal of Medicine, Chest, Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, Journal of Thoracic Oncology, and American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, with additional titles expected in the coming weeks.

• Clinical practice guidelines from organizations including the American College of Cardiology, the American Association of Clinical Endocrinology, the European Society For Medical Oncology, the American College of Emergency Physicians, and the American Gastroenterological Association.

Additional features include:

• Application programming interface (API)-based integration options compatible with workflow tools.

• An upgraded user interface with improved navigation, native voice-to-text dictation in the mobile application, query history controls through a privacy panel, and switching between adult and pediatric contexts.

• Privacy and security controls designed to support HIPAA-compliant use and protect patient health information (PHI).

• A reading assistant enabling clinicians to explore full-text articles, described as coming in March.

• Multi-language support and prompt sharing.