- Design
- Prospective single-centre, single-arm feasibility study
- Population
- 98 adults before an urgent primary care appointment
- Primary outcome
- Safety stops, conversation quality, patient and physician experience
- Effect
- 0 safety stops; 1 hallucination; physicians found it helpful in 33 of 44 cases
In a single-centre US feasibility study, 98 adults booked for an urgent single-complaint primary care visit talked with a patient-facing conversational AI in the days beforehand. Every conversation was watched by a physician supervisor able to stop it, and the transcript and summary went to the treating physician.
No conversation needed a safety stop under the predefined criteria. Supervisors noted one hallucination and added clinical information in five conversations. Clinical evaluators rated conversations favourably on 87–100% of criteria. Of 44 physicians who reviewed the transcript, 33 found it helpful for preparing and 25 said it might have changed what they did.
This was a supervised, single-arm study funded by the system's developer. It shows the tool can be run safely under close watch; it says nothing about diagnostic accuracy or outcomes without supervision.
- Treat AI pre-visit histories as a draft to check, not as a record to rely on.
- Ask patients directly about anything safety-critical the summary covers.
- Supervision was continuous here; unsupervised use was not tested.
- One hallucination in 98 conversations is a reminder to verify every fact taken from an AI summary.
Why it matters
Patient-facing AI is moving from simulated cases into real appointments, and the safety net in this study was a human watching every word.
Don't overread it
Feasibility under constant physician supervision does not show the tool is safe or accurate on its own.
The statistics, in plain English
With 98 conversations, zero safety stops is reassuring but cannot exclude a rare serious error; an event happening once in a few hundred conversations could easily be missed.
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