2ndOpinion Brings Privacy-First Medical AI to the Desktop

Healthcare and biomedical research increasingly depend on AI to make sense of large volumes of scientific literature, clinical documents, reports, images, and other multimodal data. Yet many of the most capable AI systems today rely heavily on cloud infrastructure. This creates legitimate concerns around data privacy, confidentiality, regulatory compliance, and control over sensitive information. Therefore, there is a need for a privacy-conscious desktop application designed specifically for clinicians, medical researchers, scientists, and healthcare organizations. Our new app 2ndOpinion bridges the gap between deep biomedical evidence synthesis, multimodal document intelligence, and privacy-preserving local AI execution. Why did we build 2ndOpinion desktop? In clinical practice and medical research, decision-making demands precision, source attribution, and absolute privacy. It is also essential that clinicians and researchers have a platform to test and build multi-modal AI workflows for day-to-day tasks. Standard cloud AI models and frameworks often present data privacy concerns when handling confidential patient information. Some lack native support for multimodal patient documents (like X-rays, ECGs, and lab reports). In addition, determining which medical and scientific source material is needed for specific tasks is something that absolutely should be handled by domain experts rather than relying on web search to find relevant documents. 2ndOpinion Desktop solves these issues by putting an autonomous, multi-agent AI engine right on your workstation — with the capability to run 100% locally when offline, or connect to specialized biomedical search engines and cloud workflows when authorized. It enables users to build/share custom local knowledge bases and agentic workflows. Key features & highlights 1. Build your own knowledge base and let agents use it Today, many medical specialties rely on clinical guidelines and research papers to guide patient care. Because these guidelines and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) vary by country and institution, building a reliable knowledge base for medical agents is becoming increasingly important. 2ndOpinion lets users build such knowledge bases to be used by agents. These databases are completely local and can be shared with other users. 2. Privacy-first Local AI & flexible LLM usage 2ndOpinion can be used 100% offline, or it can selectively run certain tasks online and others offline. It has an intelligent fallback routing system, it can: Force local mode: Complete air-gapped privacy via on-device models. Use custom API keys: Route queries directly, ideally to your institute’s own LLM deployment. You can also use your own OpenAI or Anthropic API accounts, but that doesn’t help with privacy. Use 2ndOpinion Cloud Engine: Offload heavy RAG & multi-step biomedical synthesis to the 2ndOpinion Cloud backend with automatic fallback to your local model if offline. The app also comes with a local de-identification protocol. Clinical queries frequently contain sensitive patient information. In all the interfaces provided by the app, you can turn on the de-identification protocol to scrub personally identifiable information from your queries locally. This way, even if you use online models and APIs, personal information will not leave your computer. 3. Autonomous biomedical search agents 2ndOpinion comes equipped with pre-built, specialized tools designed for medical literature and clinical trial discovery. It can autonomously decide which resource or resources would be the best to accomplish a task and then use them. The agens have the capability to search pubmed, clinical trials, the web and read full text documents. Press enter or click to view image in full size Part of available agents in 2ndOpinion desktop 4. Custom automations (multi-step workflows) You can create, customize, and execute complex multi-step workflows using an intuitive canvas. Graph/node Canvas: Connect input, decision/branching and agent execution nodes visually. Assign policies and capabilities to each node and let them carry out their tasks. Granular Model Policies: Control privacy on a per-node level (`local_only` vs. `cloud_allowed`). De-Identification Controls: Built-in anonymization safeguards to strip personal information before executing steps. Using the automations interface, you can build workflows simulating tumor boards or heart teams where multiple experts research and synthesize information regarding medical cases. Press enter or click to view image in full size Tumorboard simulation example built in 2ndOpinion desktop app 5. Specialized assistants & guided chats You can also build assistants that can achieve specific tasks in the chat interface. you can start chat sessions using standardized forms for patient intake, literature reviews, or trial matching. You can easily define custom assistants with tailored system prompts, restricted toolsets, and form inputs. Again, you can force local models and/or de-identification steps. 💻 Cross-Platform Availability 2ndOpinion Desktop is available on: macOS (You may need to enable the app settings/privacy & security) Windows Linux 🏁 Getting Started Download the latest installer for your OS: https://2ndopin.io/desktop Launch the app to automatically initialize your local databases. Select your preferred model mode: download a local model via Ollama for 100% offline privacy, or enter your API key or use 2ndOpinion Cloud (default). Start a research query!