Can AI Agents Interface Clinicians and Complex Models?

Abstract

Background: Contemporary healthcare institutions generate daily very large amounts of data, which contain highly useful information for the improvement of work organization, planning and overall efficiency. While models and techniques to extract these insights are well known and constantly developed in mathematical biology, complex systems physics and data science, the adoption of these techniques among Clinicians and Hospital Administrators remains limited, mainly due to language and methodological divides. Objective: In this article we implement an AI Multi Agent System (MAS) that allows Users to use predictive models and make statistical analyses via natural language conversations. Methods: We developed EpidemIA, a training-free MAS endowed with a modular suite of epidemiological models written by human experts, executable on a single-GPU workstation. To avoid relaying sensitive data to third parties, the system uses locally an open-weights LLM as backbone for its two subagents. Results: Using a dataset of Emergency Department visits provided to us by IRCCS Sant'Orsola (Bologna) we test the model on a few typical use cases, demonstrating the possibility of performing both simpler statistical analyses and visualizations as well as more complicated epidemiological predictions based on dynamical models, through simple queries made in natural language. Conclusions: While still being a proof-of-concept implementation, EpidemIA showcases the transformative capabilities of LLM based technologies as an enabling factor in the widespread adoption of complex dynamical models, which is at present hindered by their steep learning curve.