Clinical orders — acuity as the autonomy dial
Low-acuity orders auto-file; high-acuity always waits for a clinician.
Open the live lab · pre-loaded to this scenario
Human-in-the-Loop Approval
Context
An agent triages AI-suggested orders. Low-acuity, routine orders can auto-file, but high-acuity orders always route to a clinician — acuity, not volume, sets the autonomy level.
The decision
Acuity is the autonomy dial: the ceiling is the level that still holds every high-acuity order for a human, no matter the throughput cost.
What most miss
The instinct is to raise autonomy uniformly to clear the queue. In clinical the tier is everything — a high-acuity order that auto-files is a patient-safety event, not a metric.
Stakes
One auto-filed high-acuity order that should have waited for a clinician is a safety event.
Studied · Agent & Protocol · verified 2026-07-03
Sources: Clinical decision-support autonomy / acuity-tiered oversight; Order-entry human-in-the-loop safety patterns