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

July 10, 2026 updated by: Jonathan Chen, Stanford University

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

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

Study Overview

Status

Not yet recruiting

Conditions

Intervention / Treatment

Study Type

Interventional

Enrollment (Estimated)

15

Phase

  • Not Applicable

Contacts and Locations

This section provides the contact details for those conducting the study, and information on where this study is being conducted.

Study Locations

  • United States
    • California
      • Stanford, California, United States, 94305
        • Stanford University
        • Contact:

Participation Criteria

Researchers look for people who fit a certain description, called eligibility criteria. Some examples of these criteria are a person's general health condition or prior treatments.

Eligibility Criteria

Ages Eligible for Study

  • Adult
  • Older Adult

Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Description

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

Study Plan

This section provides details of the study plan, including how the study is designed and what the study is measuring.

How is the study designed?

Design Details

  • Primary Purpose: Health Services Research
  • Allocation: N/A
  • Interventional Model: Single Group Assignment
  • Masking: None (Open Label)

Arms and Interventions

Participant Group / Arm
Intervention / Treatment
Experimental: Primary care physicians
Primary care physicians make management decisions on synthetic patient cases. Each physician reviews four cases in random order: two with SAGE (AI clinical decision support) and two using a standard eConsult approach.
Other: SAGE (AI clinical decision support)
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.
Other: Standard eConsult
A standard electronic consultation (eConsult) format, without SAGE. Physicians review this information while making a management decision for the synthetic case.

What is the study measuring?

Primary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure
Measure Description
Time Frame
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.
Post-session independent review, through study completion (up to approximately 2 months)
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.
Post-session independent review, through study completion (up to approximately 2 months)

Secondary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure
Measure Description
Time Frame
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.
End of study session (Day 1, approximately 60 minutes)
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.
During study session (Day 1)
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.
During study session (Day 1)

Collaborators and Investigators

This is where you will find people and organizations involved with this study.

Sponsor

Stanford University

Investigators

  • Principal Investigator: Jonathan Chen, MD, PhD, Stanford University

Study record dates

These dates track the progress of study record and summary results submissions to ClinicalTrials.gov. Study records and reported results are reviewed by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to make sure they meet specific quality control standards before being posted on the public website.

Study Major Dates

Study Start (Estimated)

July 1, 2026

Primary Completion (Estimated)

September 1, 2026

Study Completion (Estimated)

September 1, 2026

Study Registration Dates

First Submitted

July 10, 2026

First Submitted That Met QC Criteria

July 10, 2026

First Posted (Actual)

July 16, 2026

Study Record Updates

Last Update Posted (Actual)

July 16, 2026

Last Update Submitted That Met QC Criteria

July 10, 2026

Last Verified

July 1, 2026

More Information

Terms related to this study

Keywords

Other Study ID Numbers

  • 85430

Plan for Individual participant data (IPD)

Plan to Share Individual Participant Data (IPD)?

NO

Drug and device information, study documents

Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated drug product

No

Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated device product

No

This information was retrieved directly from the website clinicaltrials.gov without any changes. If you have any requests to change, remove or update your study details, please contact register@clinicaltrials.gov. As soon as a change is implemented on clinicaltrials.gov, this will be updated automatically on our website as well.

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