informed-patient

Informed Patient

This Claude Skill provides a framework to help you use Claude to research medical evidence to inform specific health questions, primarily designed around use cases like trying to understand and organize questions about symptoms, preparing for an upcoming medical appointment, and gathering evidence for either differential diagnosis questions or condition progression.

When you ask a medical question, Claude will walk you through a semi-structured cognitive interview to elicit context for its search, then conduct a search following a set of guidelines for evidence robustness. The skill provides two potential search "modes": by default it uses a more structured search across a defined evidence source hierarchy, but can use an open search mode for scenarios where you raise a more complex questions that falls between conditions, when you want a more exploratory mode, or when the opinionated search results are thin.

Alongside searching and synthesizing sources, Claude will weigh the strength of evidence or relevant concerns according to a set of evidence "red flags." The results will be shared in a "health evidence review," including sources, search terms, and evidence red flags to be aware of, and questions generated from the exercise to bring to your healthcare team.

The aim of this skill is not to replace your healthcare team, but to guide your use of AI as a structured search tool around health information, help you advocate for yourself and your needs, and help you become an "informed patient."

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Installation

This repository is structured as a Claude Code plugin. To install, run these commands in Claude Code:

1. Add the marketplace:

/plugin marketplace add https://github.com/DrCatHicks/informed-patient.git

2. Install the plugin:

/plugin install informed-patient@informed-patient

3. Restart Claude Code to activate.

For more on Claude Code plugins, see the plugin documentation.

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How to use it

This skill is opt-in — it shouldn't activate automatically when you ask health questions. To use it, explicitly tell Claude you'd like to use the informed-patient skill, then describe your situation. Modify trigger instructions to change this.

Claude will ask questions before searching. This interview is the foundation for the evidence review. The more specific and accurate your inputs, the more useful the search will be.

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What it does

This is a thinking tool, not a diagnostic tool.

Using AI for health is consistently one of the top use cases documented for emerging AI tools. Many people turn to AI for help when trying to make sense of a diagnosis, prepare for a specialist appointment, or understand what the research actually says about a condition. People also struggle with recognized risks of using AI, such as inaccurate results, encouragement of overly confirmatory thinking, and lack of source clarity.

The Informed-Patient Skill runs a structured process to help you use Claude with evidence science-informed instructions to create an "evidence review" around a specific health question. Using this Skill, Claude will dialogue with you to create a guided symptom/or medical scenario overview, will design a literature search according to a structured evidence hierarchy, and will create a structured document you can bring to your next medical appointment or use to document your questions.

At the end of the exercise, output is saved in a Health Evidence Review that includes:

• A structured symptom inventory (frequency, severity, functional impact, timeline)
• A literature search with transparent search terms
• A verification note so you can check the sources yourself
• An Evidence Snapshot with 1-3 bullets on how well-studied a condition is, the strongest relevant finding(s), and clinical challenges
• Competing scenarios or hypotheses for your symptom picture, with evidence for and against each
• Epistemic red flags relevant to your situation (e.g., understudied condition, long time-to-diagnosis, self-report as primary evidence)
• A prioritized question list for your appointment, ranked by you

Scenarios where this Skill could be useful

• You're preparing for a first appointment with a new doctor
• You're mid-diagnostic-journey and trying to make sense of what you've been told
• You're curious about a diagnosis and want to get a starting place to evaluate the evidence behind treatment options
• You're curious about the evidence about a new medicine and how it's been studied
• You want to track and consider the possible connections between disparate symptoms