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NCT Number: NCT07706920

Testing an AI Tool to Help Primary Care Clinicians With Specialty Consultation Questions

The goal of this study is to test an artificial intelligence (AI) tool called SAGE. SAGE helps primary care doctors with questions that often need a specialist. Primary care doctors are the doctors people usually see first. SAGE reviews a case and suggests what a specialist might advise.

The main questions it aims to answer are:

* Do doctors make sound, timely care decisions when they use SAGE? * Do those decisions match what a specialist would advise?

Researchers will compare the decisions doctors make with and without SAGE.

Doctors in the study will:

* Review made-up patient cases (these are not real patients) * Make a decision for each case, their usual way and with SAGE

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Key information

Conditions

Decision Support Systems, Clinical Referral and Consultation

Age range

18 year and older

Sex eligibility

All sexes

Study type

Interventional

Phase

Not applicable

Primary location

Who can participate

Healthy volunteers accepted: Yes

Only the study team can determine whether someone qualifies for participation.

Inclusion criteria

  • Physician practicing in primary care internal medicine and/or family medicine
  • Attending physician, or resident physician at postgraduate year 2 (PGY-2) or higher
  • Stanford-affiliated (faculty, staff, or trainee)
  • Able to complete a single, approximately 60-minute remote (Zoom) session conducted in English

Exclusion criteria

  • Not currently practicing in primary care internal medicine or family medicine
  • Member of the study team or otherwise involved in the development of SAGE
  • Unable to complete the remote study session

Treatment and study plan

SAGE (AI clinical decision support)

Other

SAGE is an artificial intelligence (AI) based clinical decision support tool. It generates specialty-informed recommendations for a primary care consultation question. Physicians review the SAGE output while making a management decision for the synthetic case.

Standard eConsult

Other

A standard electronic consultation (eConsult) format, without SAGE. Physicians review this information while making a management decision for the synthetic case.

Primary outcomes

  1. Clinical actionability of the clinician's decision

    Time frame: Post-session independent review, through study completion (up to approximately 2 months)

    For each case, independent reviewers judge whether the physician's decision is clinically actionable, meaning the physician can act on it now rather than wait for a specialist. The outcome is the proportion of cases judged actionable, measured separately for decisions made with SAGE and for decisions made the standard way.

  2. Concordance of the clinician's decision with the specialist reference answer

    Time frame: Post-session independent review, through study completion (up to approximately 2 months)

    Agreement between the physician's management decision and a specialist reference answer, rated by independent reviewers, with inter-rater agreement summarized. Assessed for decisions made with SAGE and for decisions made the standard way.

Secondary outcomes

  1. System usability (System Usability Scale, SUS)

    Time frame: End of study session (Day 1, approximately 60 minutes)

    Perceived usability of SAGE measured with the 10-item System Usability Scale (SUS), scored from 0 to 100.

  2. Order acceptance in the SAGE condition

    Time frame: During study session (Day 1)

    Proportion of SAGE-suggested orders that the clinician accepts, assessed in the SAGE condition.

  3. Time to complete case review

    Time frame: During study session (Day 1)

    Time (in minutes) taken to review each case and reach a management decision, compared between the SAGE and standard eConsult conditions.

Sponsors and collaborators

Lead sponsor

Stanford University

Other

Registry information

Official study title

Physician Usability and Output Quality Evaluation of a Retrieval-Augmented Language Model System for Specialty Medical Consultation: A Human-Computer Interaction Study

Acronym: SAGE

Important dates

Study start
2026
Primary completion
2026
Study completion
2026
First posted
Jul 16, 2026
Registry last updated
Jul 16, 2026

OpenTrials presents study information sourced from ClinicalTrials.gov. The official registry record should be consulted for the latest information.

View the official ClinicalTrials.gov record (opens in a new tab)

This listing is for discovery and informational purposes only. It is not medical advice, does not guarantee that a study is recruiting, and does not determine eligibility. Contact the study team and a qualified healthcare professional when considering participation.

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