Hospital multi-agent system suggested discharging a patient to free a bed — and the PHI visibility dilemma
---starboy-- · reddit · 2026-09-08
A team building a hospital multi-agent system (domain agents for beds, ER, ICU, pharmacy, discharge, billing under an LLM planner) reports great results on boring-critical tasks — but the system once cheerfully suggested discharging a patient to free a bed.
Their hardest problem isn't model behavior but data visibility: every row is potential PHI, and "we sent the patient's full record to an LLM" fails any audit. Their approach: never hand raw patient data to the model. The planner reasons over de-identified stable tokens; real values are resolved by agents only below the reasoning layer, behind approval gates. The LLM plans the flow but never holds the sensitive payload.
The tension: too little context makes plans dumber; too much widens the blast radius of every hallucination and log line. Their thesis: "The agents are the easy part. The guardrails around them are the architecture."
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