A Multi-Agent Framework with Diagnostic Feedback for Iterative Plain Language Summary Generation from Cochrane Medical Abstracts

AbstractPlain Language Summaries PLS improve health literacy and enable informed healthcare decisions but writing them requires domain expertise and is time-consuming. Automated methods often prioritize efficiency over comprehension and medical documents unique simplification requirements challenge generic solutions. We present a multi-agent system for generating PLS using Cochrane PLS as proof of concept. The system uses specialized agents for information extraction writing diagnosis and evaluation integrating a medical glossary and statistical analyzer to guide revisions. We evaluated three architectural configurations on 100 Cochrane abstracts using six LLMs both proprietary and open-source. Results reveal model-dependent trade-offs between factuality and readability with the multi-agent approach showing improvements for smaller models and providing operational advantages in control and interpretability.