Clinician Handbook

MARCUS helps clinical teams find and synthesize information from institution-controlled documents. It searches the approved sources available in the selected workspace, drafts a response, and links the response back to supporting material.

MARCUS is not an autonomous medical decision-maker, a patient record, an emergency service, or a substitute for professional review. Its output is a draft grounded in the source set that was available at the time of the question.

Audience

This handbook is for clinicians, educators, quality and safety staff, operational leaders, and other authorized institutional users. It is also useful to project owners and administrators who prepare source sets for clinical teams.

Availability

The handbook is publicly readable. Using the MARCUS application requires an account and access to an organization.

What you can see or change in the application depends on:

• your organization membership;
• your access to the selected library workspace, called a project in MARCUS;
• whether your project access is read-only or read-write; and
• which optional features your organization has enabled.

If a page, button, workspace, or source is missing, do not assume that it does not exist. It may be outside your organization, outside your assigned project access, or unavailable in the current configuration.

The Four Boundaries To Confirm First

Before asking a question, confirm these four things:

The Library page is different from all four. It is a cross-project exploration page that helps you inspect accessible sources across the current organization. Finding a document on the Library page does not, by itself, prove that the document is in the active project's source set or included in the current question scope.

Key Workflow: From Sign-In To Reviewed Answer

1. Confirm the organization. Check that you are working in the intended institutional space.
2. Select the library workspace. Choose the project that contains the relevant approved documents.
3. Inspect the project source set. Make sure the expected documents are present and marked ready or indexed before relying on them for a question.
4. Ask a non-PHI question. Keep the question about approved institutional knowledge, not about an identifiable or specific patient.
5. Wait for source review. MARCUS searches the allowed indexed passages and drafts a response.
6. Open the citations. Confirm that the cited text supports the statement beside it and that the source is current and applicable.
7. Use professional judgment. Resolve missing, conflicting, outdated, or locally inapplicable evidence before using the draft in practice.

Suitable non-PHI questions include:

• “What does our approved appendicitis pathway say about postoperative discharge criteria?”
• “Which institutional policy describes escalation after hours?”
• “Compare the definitions used in these two approved quality-improvement documents.”

Expected Result And Verification

You are ready to use MARCUS when you can verify all of the following:

• the correct organization is active;
• the intended library workspace is selected;
• the expected sources appear in that project's source set;
• relevant sources have completed processing;
• the answer contains citations when the available evidence supports an answer;
• each important claim can be checked against an opened citation; and
• any gap, conflict, or uncertainty remains visible in your final interpretation.

An answer that sounds polished but lacks supporting citations is not verified. A citation that merely mentions the topic is not enough; it must support the specific claim being made.

What MARCUS Does Not Establish

MARCUS does not, by itself, establish that:

• the source is the latest approved version;
• the source applies to your location, service, patient population, or current workflow;
• the source set is complete;
• a cited statement is clinically appropriate in every circumstance;
• an answer is free of omissions or drafting errors; or
• your institution has authorized a particular operational or clinical use.

Those remain human and institutional review responsibilities.

Common Problems

The answer reviews the wrong material

Check the active organization, library workspace, and project source set. A broad search on the Library page does not automatically change the question's project scope.

The expected document is present but not used

Confirm that processing is complete, try the document's exact title or local terminology, and open the source briefing or source details. The document may be present but not yet searchable, or the relevant wording may differ from the question.

A feature or control is missing

The feature may require a different role, read-write access, an enabled configuration, or an administrator action. Ask your organization administrator to confirm access rather than repeatedly retrying.

The answer is confident but the evidence is weak

Treat citations, source authority, coverage, version status, and local applicability as separate checks. Confident wording does not replace those checks.

The question starts becoming patient-specific

Stop and remove the patient-specific material. Reframe the question around the approved institutional document or general workflow, without including patient facts or identifiers.

Safety Note: Institutional Non-PHI Workspace

MARCUS currently has no PHI lane. Do not enter, upload, paste, connect, or transmit:

• protected health information (PHI);
• patient identifiers;
• patient-specific clinical facts, even when direct identifiers have been removed;
• credentials, passwords, access tokens, or secrets; or
• other prohibited or unapproved data.

Use only approved institutional non-PHI documents and non-patient-specific questions. Do not use MARCUS for patient diagnosis, autonomous clinical decisions, or emergency guidance. If prohibited data is entered, stop using the affected material and follow your institution's reporting process.

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• Related: Workspace and access, Getting started, and How MARCUS grounds answers