LibGuides: Artificial Intelligence (AI) Guide: Clinical

Clinical Research Overview

Never upload PHI/PII into an AI tool which might retain the data. You must remain HIPAA and FERPA compliant.
AI may perpetuate biases present in healthcare institutions and biomedical data.
Regulations on AI in healthcare are still evolving. Is there a "human-in-the-loop" system to review and validate generated decisions? Who is ultimately responsible if AI makes a decision that harms a patient?
What corpus is the tool pulling from? Do they exclusively search open-access content? Are they transparent about sources they draw from—web resources, published articles, preprints, etc.? Many AI tools search Semantic Scholar or OpenAlex, which have wide coverage, but do not offer the same breadth of coverage as the library's bibliographic databases.
Recognize that no database or AI tool contains access to ALL literature. Best practice is to search more than one database or tool to cast a wide net, especially in EBP/EBM. AI may be biased towards certain types of literature, such as the most accessible.
Do not become overdependent on AI. Apply your clinical judgment and evaluate patient values in making any healthcare decisions.

Note: All AI can hallucinate, provide poor quality outputs, or oversimplify complex topics. Apply critical analysis to any output.

Use the ROBOT test to evaluate AI tools.

MICROMEDEX
Micromedex is a suite of databases offering comprehensive drug, disease and toxicology information for health care professionals, as well as patient handouts.

Micromedex Assistant – A reference chatbot that permits natural language queries, quickly directing you to relevant Micromedex content.

OpenEvidence
An AI-powered platform that aggregates, synthesizes, and visualizes peer reviewed medical literature in a format intended to be easily understood and support healthcare professionals in learning and making evidence-based decisions. With OpenEvidence, you can also create multiple-choice questions and tables, calculate risk scores, and write patient handouts. It has signed content agreements with JAMA and NEJM, plus it also sources open access literature.

Access granted by providing your NPI or uploading your student ID.
PubTator3
An AI-powered resource from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that helps researchers navigate and search biomedical literature, including both abstracts and full-text articles. It uses advanced text mining to automatically identify and annotate key biological concepts (like genes, diseases, and chemicals) and their relationships, enabling powerful semantic and relation-based searches.

TRIP (Turning Research Into Practice)
TRIP is an evidence-based practice database. You can submit clinical queries, and results are organized by the levels of evidence.

AskTrip – An LLM-powered, clinically-focused chatbot. It will provide a summary including the following elements: Background, Evidence, Limitations/Gaps, and Conclusion. Intext citations are included with links to the sources in PubMed or the publisher website(s). It will also provide a Quality of evidence rating: High, Good, Moderate, or Limited.

You can submit up to 3 clinical queries a month in the free version, which still requires an account.
UpToDate® Online
A comprehensive, evidence-based clinical information resource, designed to give practical answers to clinicians at the point of care. Access is available for faculty, staff, students, residents, and fellows of UT Southwestern Medical Center, thanks to funding from the Office of the Dean, UT Southwestern Medical School.
VisualDx
An image-based differential diagnosis tool that is designed to help quickly identify diseases or conditions at the point of care. Includes more than 25,000 medical images and over 1,300 pediatric and adult conditions.

See also the Discover resources for other valuable bibliographic databases.