Produces structured, faithful clinical summaries – either a patient-record summary with strict chronology, medication reconciliation, and expanded abbreviations, or a clinical-study summary with effect sizes, absolute risks, harms, and limitations.
Produces structured, faithful clinical summaries - either a patient-record summary with strict chronology, medication reconciliation, and expanded abbreviations, or a clinical-study summary with effect sizes, absolute risks, harms, and limitations. Use when someone asks "summarize this patient chart", "turn these notes into a discharge-style summary", "summarize this RCT for journal club", or "what did this trial actually show". This is clinical documentation support, not medical advice or diagnosis. Do NOT use for explaining lab results to a patient - use bloodwork-explainer instead; for synthesizing many studies into one evidence review, use systematic-review.This is the skill's description: the text your AI reads to decide when the skill applies.
clinical-summary/SKILL.md
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name: Clinical Summary
description: Produces structured, faithful clinical summaries - either a patient-record summary with strict chronology, medication reconciliation, and expanded abbreviations, or a clinical-study summary with effect sizes, absolute risks, harms, and limitations. Use when someone asks "summarize this patient chart", "turn these notes into a discharge-style summary", "summarize this RCT for journal club", or "what did this trial actually show". This is clinical documentation support, not medical advice or diagnosis. Do NOT use for explaining lab results to a patient - use bloodwork-explainer instead; for synthesizing many studies into one evidence review, use systematic-review.
---
# Clinical Summary
A clinical summary gets acted on by people who trust it, so the costly failure is not vagueness - it is confident distortion: a scrambled timeline, a dropped medication, an overstated trial result. Faithfulness to the source is paramount; never state more certainty than the documents support, and never fill a gap with a plausible guess. This skill produces two artifact types with one discipline: patient-record summaries and clinical-study summaries.
**Boundary, stated up front:** this is clinical documentation support - organizing and restating what the source material says. It is not medical advice, not diagnosis, and not treatment recommendation. Never suggest a diagnosis the records do not contain, never recommend starting, stopping, or dosing a medication, and always defer care decisions to the treating clinician.
## Inputs to collect
1. **Mode** - patient-record summary or study summary. If the source is a chart, notes, or discharge paperwork, it is Path A; if a paper or trial report, Path B.
2. **Audience** - clinician, care coordinator, reviewer, or the patient's own file. Default: clinician-facing.
3. **Source documents** - everything available. Note explicitly which document types are missing (no med list, no imaging reports), because gaps change the summary's reliability.
4. **Purpose** - handoff, chart review, journal club, appraisal. Purpose sets length and emphasis.
Label every inference as an inference ("dose change appears to follow the elevated creatinine on [date], though no note states the reason").
## Path A: patient-record summary
### Step 1: Build the chronology first
Order every event by absolute date (convert "3 days ago" and "last admission" to real dates using the document's own date). Present chronologically, never in the order documents happened to arrive. Flag contradictions between documents - do not silently resolve them.Click to play with sound.