AI Healthcare
Nature Medicine review finds only 19 LLM RCTs amid 4,609 clinical papers
By Arjun
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13 Aug 10:03 AM
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Via Nature Medicine
A Nature Medicine LLM-assisted systematic review identified 4,609 peer-reviewed clinical LLM studies from January 2022 through September 2025, about 3.2 papers a day. Only an estimated 1,048 used real-world patient data, and just 19 were prospective randomized trials. Most work stayed in simulated scenarios or exam-style tasks, OpenAI models dominated evaluations, and LLMs beat human comparators in only about one third of head-to-head results, less often on real clinical data than on quizzes. That matters as hospitals buy copilots faster than evidence matures. The caveat is that the review itself used LLM screening validated on samples, so residual misclassification remains possible.
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