AI co-clinician: researching the path toward AI-augmented care

This post details advancements in the AI co-clinician research initiative, focusing on two key areas: augmenting clinicians and real-time multimodal capabilities in telemedical settings. For clinician augmentation, the AI demonstrated superior performance over leading evidence synthesis tools and other frontier AI systems in objective analysis of primary care queries and medication knowledge tests. In telemedical settings, the AI co-clinician, leveraging Gemini and Project Astra, was tested for its ability to use live audio and video to engage with patients, simulating telemedical calls. While expert physicians outperformed the AI overall, particularly in identifying 'red flags' and guiding physical examinations, the AI performed comparably to or exceeding primary care physicians in 68 of 140 assessed areas. The post also highlights the engineering of trust through a dual-agent architecture (Planner and Talker) and rigorous evidence verification and citation checking.