MedAgentBrief for Hospital Course Summarization: Safety, Use, and Discharge Documentation Burden

Abstract

Abstract Importance High-quality discharge summaries are essential for safe care transitions but contribute substantially to clinician documentation burden and burnout. While retrospective studies suggest large language models (LLMs) can generate clinical summaries of comparable quality to physicians, prospective data on their safety, utility, and impact on clinician well-being in real-world environments are lacking. Objective To evaluate the safety, utilization, and impact on clinician burden of MedAgentBrief, an LLM-based agentic workflow for generating hospital course summaries, during prospective clinical deployment. Design, Setting, and Participants Single-arm prospective pilot study encompassing 384 hospital discharges at one academic inpatient medicine unit from August 1 to October 11, 2025, with baseline comparisons drawn from April 9 to July 31, 2025. Intervention MedAgentBrief, a custom agentic AI workflow utilizing Gemini 2.5 Pro, generated draft hospital course summaries nightly using the patient’s history and physical and daily progress notes. Drafts were securely emailed to physicians daily for review and optional use. Main Outcomes and Measures The primary outcome was physician-reported potential for and severity of harm from unedited summaries (AHRQ Common Format Harm Scale). Secondary outcomes included utilization rate, error types (omissions, inaccuracies, hallucinations), time spent in discharge summaries (EHR logs), and changes in cognitive burden (NASA Task Load Index [NASA-TLX]) and burnout (Stanford Professional Fulfillment Index [PFI] Work Exhaustion Scale). Results The system generated 1274 summaries. Of 384 discharges, physicians utilized AI content in 219 (57%) cases. Feedback on 100 summaries (40.2%) noted omissions (25%) and inaccuracies (20%) but rare hallucinations (2%). Physicians rated 88% of unedited summaries as having no harm potential and 1% as likely to cause moderate harm; no severe harm was reported. Physician burnout scores decreased significantly (1.75 vs 1.20; P = .03). Time savings were heterogeneous: 71% of physicians saw reductions in median documentation time (up to 2.9 minutes). Conclusions and Relevance An LLM-based agentic workflow produced hospital course summaries that were frequently utilized with mild to minimal risk of harm identified. The intervention was associated with a significant reduction in physician burnout, supporting the viability of AI summarization to mitigate documentation burden.

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