Isolate the contributions of individual AI-support components

Determine the independent and combined effects of chart-level summaries, holistic summaries, and conversational interaction on healthcare professionals’ physical-activity planning outcomes and patterns of sensemaking.

Background

The study’s AI-assisted condition bundled three forms of support: chart-level natural-language summaries, a holistic patient summary, and conversational interaction. Because all three were available together, the observed effects cannot be attributed to any single component. The authors explicitly state that the study does not resolve the independent contributions of these components and identify ablation or factorial experiments as the appropriate way to separate their effects.

References

Our study therefore cannot determine the independent contribution of each component to the observed outcomes or patterns of use.

— Verify, Offload, Extend & Recommend: Selective Complementarity in AI Support for Physical Activity Planning with Longitudinal Patient Data  (2609.18479 - Pakianathan et al., 16 Sep 2026) in Section 6, “Limitations and Future Work”