Classify, redact, and design a control

Three things a bench scientist actually has to do with a proposed AI use: sort it by risk, remove what should not go into a prompt, and choose the review control that fits the specific task. Work each check before reading the debrief; the first answer committed is the one recorded for review.

Five proposed uses are in play across the checks below: drafting a plain-language outline of an already-approved competency policy; generating a practice case for training; asking the tool to interpret a specific patient's abnormal result; asking the tool to draft language for a critical-value phone call before it is placed; and asking the tool for code review on a laboratory information system (LIS) reporting script that a qualified person will test before deployment.

Sort each one by where it sits on the risk ladder from the mental-model section, and notice that two of the five, the patient-result interpretation and the critical-value draft, land in the higher-risk band regardless of how carefully the prompt is worded, because the task itself is the risk driver, not the phrasing.

Next, a prompt-redaction task. A tech drafts a prompt asking the tool to help write an incident report: it currently names the patient's accession number, the analyzer's reagent lot number, and a description of the event. Removing that identifying detail is necessary before the prompt goes anywhere, but it is not sufficient by itself; the destination tool's contract terms, whether a BAA is signed and what the retention and training-use terms are, still decide whether the redacted prompt is approved to enter at all. A redacted prompt sent to an unapproved consumer tool is still a misuse, just a smaller one.

Finally, a control-design task. Given the automation-bias mitigations described earlier, requiring an independent initial assessment before viewing the AI output, showing supporting evidence or uncertainty, and training reviewers with deliberately incorrect examples, choose which mitigation best fits a scenario where a new tech has started copying an AI drafting tool's suggested wording into shift-change notes without checking it against the prior shift's actual documentation.

The task defines the risk band before the prompt is even written, and redacting a prompt is one control among several, not a substitute for an approved destination and a documented reviewer.