Coupled Graph--Policy Distillation for Personalized Medication Safety in Older Adults with Multimorbidity
2026-08-10 • Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence
AI summaryⓘ
The authors present ATLAS, a system designed to help review medications safely for older adults with multiple health issues. It uses detailed medical guidelines and patient-specific information to identify medication risks and suggest safer alternatives. They test ATLAS against other systems on various benchmarks and find it performs better in making safe medication choices. A doctor also reviewed the results and found ATLAS generally safer than similar tools. The study focuses on improving medication safety using AI tailored to individual patient needs.
Large Language Model (LLM)Medication ReviewMultimorbidityGeriatric RiskMedication-safety GraphPolicy DistillationPatient-specific Medication Conflict Graph (PMCG)Safety-critical InformationBenchmarkingClinical Decision Support
Authors
Zihan Wang, Anglin Liu, Rongyi Wang, Dantong Li, Yi Lu, Siqing Yuan, Hongxia Xu, Zhongtian Long, Jintai Chen
Abstract
Large language model (LLM) agents can support medication review between clinical visits, but safe choices for older adults with multimorbidity depend on conditions, medications, and geriatric risks that users may omit. We introduce ATLAS, a coupled graph--policy distillation framework for patient-adaptive medication safety. ATLAS structures guideline evidence as a medication-safety graph. Targeted questions update the patient state and distill relevant relations into a patient-specific medication conflict graph (PMCG). A risk-first multi-agent policy uses the PMCG to screen contraindications, assess cautions and monitoring needs, identify safer alternatives, and verify the final medication plan. We also introduce GeriMedBench, an interactive benchmark that tests safety-critical information acquisition and evidence-based decision revision. Across a European non-interactive multimorbidity benchmark, an Asian interactive multimorbidity benchmark, and an Asian non-interactive cross-guideline benchmark, ATLAS achieves the strongest complete-decision performance among the compared systems. On the European non-interactive multimorbidity benchmark, it exceeds the strongest proprietary LLM baseline by 53.73 points in Strict Success Rate and 14.63 points in overall safety reasoning score (OSRS), with no unsafe recommendations under the automated evaluator. A blinded clinician evaluation gives ATLAS higher mean ratings across all five criteria and flags potentially unsafe recommendations in one ATLAS case and two Gemini cases.