Key result
Evaluating AI-guided hypertension escalation under white-coat confounding requires ~56 clusters to detect safety signals.
Why the study?
White-coat measurement confounding threatens the validity of artificial-intelligence-guided hypertension treatment escalation in community clinics because the prescribing rule and outcome share a common cause not captured by observed covariates.
This methodological study establishes formal identification conditions and cluster-level design parameters (requiring 56 clusters for 80% power to detect a 5-percentage-point effect) to evaluate the prescribing safety of AI-guided hypertension treatment escalation when white-coat blood pressure measurement confounding is unobserved.
Clinic AI hypertension algorithms risk invalid escalation from white-coat bias; leaves open whether ambulatory monitoring resolves confounding.
White-coat measurement confounding threatens the validity of artificial-intelligence-guided hypertension treatment escalation in community clinics: when the decision to intensify therapy is informed by a blood pressure reading that is itself distorted by the measurement setting, the prescribing rule and the outcome share a common cause that no observed covariate set captures. No observational data are used or claimed. The analysis declares a variance structure with between-cluster standard deviation 6.0, residual standard deviation 4.5 and intraclass correlation 0.64, and estimates power across 2000 replications per design cell for cluster counts of 8, 16, 24 and 32 and effect sizes of 3, 5 and 8 percentage points. The design requires 56 clusters to detect a 5-percentage-point escalation effect at 80 per cent power. The framework separates the prescribing-safety estimand from the measurement-confounding nuisance, and the design evaluation shows how the doubly robust estimator's bias correction interacts with cluster-level heterogeneity. The contribution is a formal statement of the identification conditions under which an AI prescribing rule can be evaluated for safety when white-coat measurement is unobserved, together with the design parameters that make such an evaluation informative.
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Mariam Hassan El-Banna (2026) studied Hypertension. AI-guided hypertension treatment escalation was evaluated on Statistical power to detect a treatment escalation effect under unmeasured white-coat measurement confounding. AI-guided hypertension treatment escalation safety evaluation under white-coat confounding (ICC 0.64) requires 56 clusters to detect a 5-percentage-point escalation effect at 80% power.
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