{"version":1,"type":"story","url":"https://digestai.news/story/asclepius-improves-clinical-agent-performance","json":"https://digestai.news/story/asclepius-improves-clinical-agent-performance.json","markdown":"https://digestai.news/story/asclepius-improves-clinical-agent-performance.md","slug":"asclepius-improves-clinical-agent-performance","headline":"Asclepius: Improves Clinical Agent Performance","summary":"Researchers have developed Asclepius, an adaptive agent framework designed to improve the performance of long-horizon clinical agents. The system was tested using the Clinical Environment Simulator (CES), a testbed where agents manage entire emergency-department shifts under continuous time and resource pressure. Current agents often reach correct diagnoses but struggle with delivering complete and timely critical actions. Asclepius addresses this by identifying three key failure modes: instruction-adherence drift, treatment incompleteness, and a severity-equity gap in timeliness. The system uses trace-level feedback to evolve an externalized clinical skills library, along with subagents that partition decisions across the patient queue. On held-out batches never seen during evolution, Asclepius improved critical-action correctness by 22% over a strong baseline agent framework while maintaining diagnostic accuracy. This work highlights the importance of addressing long-horizon failures in AI agents used for high-stakes applications like emergency departments.","keyPoints":[],"whyItMatters":null,"category":{"slug":"research","name":"Research","url":"https://digestai.news/category/research"},"entities":{"companies":[],"models":[],"people":[]},"firstPublishedAt":"2026-09-15T04:00:00Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-15T04:00:00Z","sourceCount":1,"hasPrimarySource":true,"sources":[{"outlet":"arXiv cs.AI","title":"Asclepius: An Adaptive Harness for Long-Horizon Clinical Agents","url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13543","publishedAt":"2026-09-15T04:00:00Z","type":"primary","primary":true,"lead":true}],"sourceNotes":null,"discussions":[],"thread":null,"cite":{"text":"Digest AI, \"Asclepius: Improves Clinical Agent Performance\", 15 September 2026, https://digestai.news/story/asclepius-improves-clinical-agent-performance","publisher":"Digest AI","title":"Asclepius: Improves Clinical Agent Performance","datePublished":"2026-09-15T04:00:00Z","url":"https://digestai.news/story/asclepius-improves-clinical-agent-performance"},"generatedBy":"Written by Digest AI's editorial model from the linked sources; the sources are the record.","license":"Headlines, digests and key points are written by Digest AI and may be quoted with a link to the story page. Linked articles belong to their publishers. Terms: https://digestai.news/terms#reuse"}