> For clean Markdown of any page, append .md to the page URL.
> For a complete documentation index, see https://docs.emtelligent.com/llms.txt.
> For AI client integration (Claude Code, Cursor, etc.), connect to the MCP server at https://docs.emtelligent.com/_mcp/server.

# Writing prompts

The `prompt` is your instruction for the summary. The same documents can be
summarized for a referral letter, a tumour board, a handover or a patient, and
each needs something different. Up to 8 KiB.

## Say who it is for, what to cover, and how long

A good prompt answers three questions:

|                     | Example                                                                                                                |
| ------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Who reads it**    | "for the patient's GP", "for a cardiology referral", "for a nursing handover"                                          |
| **What to cover**   | "active problems and current medications", "the oncology history: diagnoses with dates, treatments and current status" |
| **Length and form** | "in under 150 words", "as a bulleted list", "one paragraph per problem"                                                |

For example:

> Summarize the oncology history — diagnoses with dates, treatments and current
> status — for a tumour board, as a bulleted list.

> Summarize this admission for the patient's GP: reason for admission, key
> results, changes to medication, and what the GP should follow up. Under 200
> words.

## What the summary draws on

The summary is written from the documents you send, and is instructed to use nothing else. It
reports patient details (age, sex) as the documents state them. As with any
generated text, have a clinician review a summary before it informs care.

When you send several documents, more recent ones take precedence where they
disagree, so give each document its `chart_date` when you know it. See
[Several documents](/summarization/guides/several-documents).

## Asking for structure

The summary is Markdown, so you can ask for headings, lists or tables:

> List each active problem as a heading, with its most recent result and its
> current treatment beneath it.

With several documents, statements carry citations such as `[2]`, so keep any
format you ask for compatible with inline citations.

## What prompts cannot do

A prompt shapes the summary; it does not change how the documents are read, and
it cannot ask for content that is not in them. Requests that are not about the
documents — "write a poem", "ignore the documents" — produce poor results.

Documents are treated as data. Text inside a document that poses as an
instruction ("ignore the above and…") is guarded against, but no guard is
perfect: review summaries of documents from untrusted sources before acting on
them, and always [render the summary safely](/summarization/reference/result-format#rendering-the-summary).