Trial Files: Keeping Physicians Up to Date on RCTs Using LLMs

Physicians and medical trainees depend on randomized clinical trials to inform patient management, but keeping up with new studies is a challenge due to the high demands of clinical and academic responsibilities. Open-access large language models can potentially generate short, descriptive, and reliable summaries of clinical trials to inform users on emerging literature in an efficient manner. In 2023, we launched Trial Files, a bi-weekly newsletter that summarizes the results of RCTs published in premier clinical journals, New England Journal of Medicine, Annals of Internal Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), JAMA Internal Medicine, and Lancet. For each RCT, we identify the unique trial registration identifier and then leverage the associated registry application program interface (API) to extract additional datapoints for each study. The data from MEDLINE and official registries are then stored in the cloud. Trial summaries for the newsletter are generated using large language models accessible by openAI APIs. The Trial Files newsletter has expanded to additional subspecialties due to interest from practitioners, including thrombosis, nephrology, cardiology, and IBD.