CITE: Clinical Inference Tethered to Evidence - a Retrieve-and-verify Layer for AI Care Plans

Patients are randomized 1:1:1 to (1) unassisted clinician care; (2) AI-generated care plan with safety guardrails; (3) AI-generated care plan with safety guardrails plus CITE. CITE audits the finalized plan against a frozen, versioned evidence corpus and returns physician-facing flags for patient-specific codifiable safety hazards (a recommended drug contraindicated by this patient's diagnosis or laboratory value; a drug-allergy conflict; a dropped high-risk medication; a guideline-indicated therapy omitted for an active diagnosis; a stated quantity refuted by the corpus), each with a verbatim quote and citation; the clinician retains decision authority. Randomization uses a deterministic HMAC permuted-block scheme; outcome assessors are blinded to arm. The co-primary outcomes are (1) the diagnostic accuracy (sensitivity and specificity) of CITE against blinded clinician adjudication, and (2) clinician alert burden (flags per encounter) and acceptance, comparing the CITE arm with the guardrail arm; both are estimable at the enrolled sample size because they do not depend on a rare between-arm event. The unresolved codifiable-hazard rate by arm is reported as a descriptive secondary: codifiable hazards are infrequent, so the trial is not powered for a between-arm efficacy contrast on hazard reduction. A prior trial of a different mechanism (a generic deterministic rule-corpus that surfaced roughly 30 or more flags per encounter and was uninformative) was completed with null results and is registered separately; this trial evaluates a materially different, patient-specific intervention and set of outcomes. Determined exempt by WCG IRB (low risk). Analysis is pre-registered on OSF (https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/ENXCW).

Inclusion criteria

• Age 18 years or older.
• Medicaid-enrolled and attributed to a participating Waymark primary care site.
• Primary care encounter that requires clinical reasoning (not administrative-only).
• English-language clinical documentation.

Exclusion criteria

• Age less than 18 years.
• Hospice or palliative-care-exclusive care plan.
• Administrative-only or pharmacy-only encounter that does not surface a clinical decision to the supervising clinician.
• Encounter where the supervising clinician is the principal investigator.
• Enrollment in a competing AI-safety study within the prior 90 days.