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Physician-Reported Safety Outcomes of AI-Generated Hospital Course Summaries
François Grolleau1, April S Liang2, Timothy Keyes3
1Division of Computational Medicine, Stanford University, Stanford, California.
JAMA Network Open
|May 8, 2026
Summary
This study shows that an AI tool (MedAgentBrief) can generate hospital discharge summaries safely and reduce physician burnout. The AI summaries were used frequently with minimal harm, supporting its use to ease documentation burdens.
Area of Science:
- Clinical Informatics
- Artificial Intelligence in Medicine
- Healthcare Quality Improvement
Background:
- High-quality discharge summaries are crucial for patient care transitions but increase clinician workload and burnout.
- Existing research suggests large language models (LLMs) can create clinical summaries comparable to physician-generated ones, but prospective clinical data is limited.
Purpose of the Study:
- To assess the safety, utilization, and impact on clinician burden of MedAgentBrief, an LLM-based workflow for generating hospital course summaries during prospective clinical use.
- To evaluate the potential for and severity of harm associated with AI-generated summaries.
Main Methods:
- A prospective pilot quality improvement study was conducted on an academic inpatient medicine unit.
- A custom agentic LLM workflow (Gemini 2.5 Pro) generated daily draft hospital course summaries for physician review and optional use.
- Outcomes included harm potential, use rates, error types, documentation time, cognitive burden (NASA-TLX), and burnout (Stanford Professional Fulfillment Index).
Main Results:
- The LLM generated 1274 summaries for 384 discharges; 57.0% of summaries had AI content incorporated by physicians.
- Physicians reported minimal harm potential (1.0% moderate harm) and rare errors (2.0% hallucinations).
- Physician burnout scores significantly decreased (P=.03), though documentation time savings were not significant.
Conclusions:
- An LLM-based agentic workflow for hospital course summaries demonstrated frequent use and minimal safety risks in a prospective clinical setting.
- The AI summarization intervention was associated with reduced physician burnout, indicating its potential to alleviate documentation burdens.
- AI summarization shows promise for improving efficiency and clinician well-being in healthcare documentation.
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