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PAUSE-Agents: A Clinician-in-the-Loop Multi-Agent AI Pipeline for ICU-to-Ward Handoff Briefs

Amagai, S.; Liao, W.-T.; Murphy, C.; Reamer, C.; Liu, Y.; Ambil, B.; Fernandes, G.; Santhosh, L.; Lyons, P.; Jordan, N.; Liebovitz, D.; Kline, A.; Rojas, J. C.; Luo, Y.; Gao, C.

2026-07-14 intensive care and critical care medicine
10.64898/2026.07.10.26357759 medRxiv
Show abstract

ICU-to-ward transfers are high-risk transitions marked by information loss and burdensome handoff preparation. We developed PAUSE-Agents, a clinician-in-the-loop multi-agent LLM pipeline that drafts source-attributed handoff briefs from structured ICU data and clinical notes using the clinician-developed ICU-PAUSE template. Mirroring ICU team structure, PAUSE-Agents routes each record through a scribe extractor, 6 role-specialized agents, explicit conflict surfacing, and deterministic safety checks before synthesis, producing an editable first draft rather than an autonomous note. In a single-center medical ICU cohort, 5 physicians completed 100 reviews of 84 agent-drafted briefs. Among adjudicable claims, 98.8% were verified and 1.2% were incorrect; 88% of briefs had no pertinent omission, and mean PDSQI-9 quality was 4.20/5. PAUSE-Agents surfaced 118 conflict warnings and 421 safety flags, making documentation inconsistencies visible before handoff. An o4-mini PDSQI-9 judge showed limited case-level discrimination but supported aggregate monitoring. We release PAUSE-Agents and its clinician evaluation application.

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