Beyond the Individual: Virtualizing Multi-Disciplinary Reasoning for Clinical Intake via Collaborative Agents

ACL ARR 2026 January Submission8167 Authors

Keywords: Multi-Agent Systems, Clinical Intake, Medical LLMs, SOAP Notes, Collaborative Reasoning, Virtual MDT

Abstract: The initial outpatient consultation is critical for clinical decision-making, yet it is often conducted by a single physician under time pressure, making it prone to cognitive biases and incomplete evidence capture. Although the Multi-Disciplinary Team (MDT) reduces these risks, they are costly and difficult to scale to real-time intake. We propose Aegle, a synchronous virtual MDT framework that brings MDT-level reasoning to outpatient consultations via a graph-based multi-agent architecture. Aegle formalizes the consultation state using a structured SOAP representation, separating evidence collection from diagnostic reasoning to improve traceability and bias control. An orchestrator dynamically activates specialist agents, which perform decoupled parallel reasoning and are subsequently integrated by an aggregator into a coherent clinical note. Experiments on ClinicalBench and a real-world RAPID-IPN dataset across 24 departments and 53 metrics show that Aegle consistently outperforms state-of-the-art proprietary and open-source models in documentation quality and consultation capability.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Clinical and Biomedical Applications

Research Area Keywords: Clinical and Biomedical Applications, AI / LLM Agents, Dialogue and Interactive Systems, Human-Centered NLP

Contribution Types: NLP engineering experiment, Approaches to low-resource settings

Languages Studied: English, Chinese

Submission Number: 8167