I Built a Clinical AI Agent — and It Skipped the Tools I Gave It

Author(s): Marie Humbert-Droz, PhD

Originally published on Towards AI.

An evaluation of tool coverage in local healthcare agents, with a simple fix.

I thought my healthcare AI agent would call my lab-checking tool every time it encountered lab values. Instead? Only 1 out of 9 times. The rate was so low I thought there was a bug in my code.

The article discusses the shortcomings of a healthcare AI agent’s tool usage, highlighting that it only utilized its lab-checking tool 11% of the time despite having the capability. The evaluation reveals crucial insights on why the agent failed to call on the necessary tools, emphasizing the importance of explicit instructions in prompts. By adjusting the system prompt to make tool usage mandatory, the agent demonstrated improved reliability, ensuring that critical tasks such as lab flagging were appropriately executed.

Read the full blog for free on Medium.

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Published via Towards AI