Easing the hour before surgery.

Dates and assessment

Source published

2026-09-26

Bright published

2026-09-27

Substantive update

None recorded

Evidence state

Demonstrated

Independent verification

Not established by this source review

Last source review

2026-09-27

The claim in context

The human problem

The conversation before surgery carries a lot of fear, and surgeons have limited time to answer every question well.

The prior constraint

Patients relied on a single, time-pressured face-to-face conversation to get their questions answered.

AI’s actual role

A locally deployed large language model drafted personalized answers to each patient’s questions before the in-person conversation.

The documented result

Among 268 randomized patients, the AI-assisted group reported lower anxiety (GAD-7 3.2 vs 5.7) and lower physician workload (NASA-TLX 39.9 vs 56.8), with shorter conversations (11.3 vs 19.9 minutes); all differences were statistically significant.

Why it may matter

For these patients, the tool eased a stressful moment and shortened the documented pre-operative conversation.

Limitations

• A single-centre trial of 268 patients in one cancer type, randomized by room. Bright reviewed the abstract of the peer-reviewed early-access paper; the specific model is not named there, and independent replication is unknown.

Original evidence

• LLM-assisted preoperative communication reduces patient anxiety and physician workload in prostate cancer: a prospective randomized phase II trial · npj Digital Medicine · paper

Attribution

Credit Bright AI Future and link the canonical Bright record.

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