Evidence-based clinical answers

Overview

The UpToDate Lookup Expert gives your agents direct access to clinical guidelines, diagnostic criteria, and treatment protocols sourced from one of the most trusted medical references in the world. It’s built for moments when a clinician—or the AI supporting them—needs evidence-based guidance in the middle of a patient encounter.

Use it to power agents that explain recommended interventions, verify treatment decisions, or surface clinical standards without ever leaving the workflow. Whether you’re building an assistant for urgent care, chronic disease management, or inpatient triage, this Expert brings guideline-level intelligence to the point of care.

How it works

The Reference Expert integrates with UpToDate’s knowledge base to answer targeted medical questions based on curated literature. It’s orchestrated like any other Corti Expert—called when the Orchestrator detects an intent to consult clinical evidence, either directly (e.g. “What’s first-line treatment for AFib?”) or indirectly as part of a broader decision-support task.

It doesn’t infer or generalize—it retrieves exact, source-backed information, structured to support downstream decisions or communication. It’s most effective when paired with other Experts like the Interaction or Decision Expert to form a full closed-loop reasoning flow.

Common use cases

• Support clinical agents in verifying guideline-concordant treatments
• Enable second-opinion agents to explain rationale with citations
• Assist documentation systems in including evidence-based justifications
• Ground clinician-facing answers in standard of care references
  

Configure

To use the UpToDate Lookup Expert, ensure your system has an active subscription with UpToDate and authorized access credentials. Once configured, you can enable this Expert within your Agent’s routing rules, defining when and how it should be queried. Responses can be piped into chat-based assistants, pre-chart summaries, or inline clinical decision support surfaces.