Effect of Uncertainty-Aware AI Models on Pharmacists’ Reaction Time and Decision-Making in a Web-Based Mock Medication Verification Task: Randomized Controlled Trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Artificial intelligence (AI)-based clinical decision support systems are increasingly used in health care. Uncertainty-aware AI presents the model's confidence in its decision alongside its prediction, whereas black-box AI only provides a prediction. Little is known about how this type of AI affects health care providers' work performance and reaction time. Objective: This study aimed to determine the effects of black-box and uncertainty-aware AI advice on pharmacist decision-making and reaction time. Methods: Recruitment emails were sent to pharmacists through professional listservs describing a web-based, crossover, randomized controlled trial. Participants were randomized to the black-box AI or uncertainty-aware AI condition in a 1:1 manner. Participants completed 100 mock verification tasks with AI help and 100 without AI help. The order of no help and AI help was randomized. Participants were exposed to correct and incorrect prescription fills, where the correct decision was to "accept" or "reject," respectively. AI help provided correct (79%) or incorrect (21%) advice. Reaction times, participant decisions, AI advice, and AI help type were recorded for each verification. Likelihood ratio tests compared means across the three categories of AI type for each level of AI correctness. Results: A total of 30 participants provided complete datasets. An equal number of participants were in each AI condition. Participants' decision-making performance and reaction times differed across the 3 conditions. Accurate AI recommendations resulted in the rejection of the incorrect drug 96.1% and 91.8% of the time for uncertainty-aware AI and black-box AI respectively, compared with 81.2% without AI help. Correctly dispensed medications were accepted at rates of 99.2% with black-box help, 94.1% with uncertainty-aware AI help, and 94.6% without AI help. Uncertainty-aware AI protected against bad AI advice to approve an incorrectly filled medication compared with black-box AI (83.3% vs 76.7%). When the AI recommended rejecting a correctly filled medication, pharmacists without AI help had a higher rate of correctly accepting the medication (94.6%) compared with uncertainty-aware AI help (86.2%) and black-box AI help (81.2%). Uncertainty-aware AI resulted in shorter reaction times than black-box AI and no AI help except in the scenario where "AI rejects the correct drug." Black-box AI did not lead to reduced reaction times compared with pharmacists acting alone. Conclusions: Pharmacists' performance and reaction times varied by AI type and AI accuracy. Overall, uncertainty-aware AI resulted in faster decision-making and acted as a safeguard against bad AI advice to approve a misfilled medication. Conversely, black-box AI had the longest reaction times, and user performance degraded in the presence of bad AI advice. However, uncertainty-aware AI could result in unnecessary double-checks, but it is preferred over false negative advice, where patients receive the wrong medication. These results highlight the importance of well-designed AI that addresses users' needs, enhances performance, and avoids overreliance on AI.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".