| name | medical-source-failover |
| description | Route retrieval of Chinese medical guidelines, consensus statements, regulatory documents, drug information, safety notices, standards, and public-health materials through authoritative originals and verified fallback copies. Use when a canonical medical source is blocked, slow, unavailable, moved, paywalled, or difficult to parse, or when designing and auditing domestic medical-source fallback rules. Do not treat secondary summaries or reposts as independent clinical evidence. |
| metadata | {"octop":{"emoji":"🛟","label":{"zh":"信源熔断降级","en":"Medical Source Failover"},"summary":{"zh":"原文受阻时按可信路径降级访问，不降低证据标准。","en":"Failover blocked originals without lowering evidence standards."}}} |
Medical Source Failover
Retrieve the intended medical document reliably without laundering a secondary source into primary evidence.
Non-negotiable invariant
Degrade the access path, never the document identity or evidentiary standard.
- Keep authority, document quality, access health, and retrieval priority as separate judgments.
- A domain's reputation does not grade every item published on it.
- A repost that reproduces the same document is an access carrier, not independent corroboration.
- A summary, interpretation, search snippet, news item, or social post may help discover an original; it must not support a precise recommendation, dose, contraindication, or evidence grade.
Load the relevant references
- For any domestic medical retrieval, read references/domestic-source-registry.md before selecting sources. It defines authoritative scope, discovery-only sources, fallback relationships, and how to extend the registry.
- When a page is blocked, slow, moved, paywalled, incomplete, or unparseable, read references/failover-policy.md before retrying or switching hosts.
- Before using a repost, mirror, alternate PDF, cached copy, or database full text, read references/document-identity.md and verify that it is the same document and version.
Workflow
- Classify the requested fact before searching:
- regulation or legal status;
- approved drug indication, contraindication, dosage, or label;
- pharmacovigilance or adverse-reaction notice;
- reimbursement or payment scope;
- public-health policy, surveillance, or prevention;
- national or industry standard;
- clinical guideline or consensus;
- effectiveness, diagnosis, prognosis, or harm evidence;
- teaching or explanatory material.
- Define the intended document identity from all available fields: normalized title, issuing/developing organization, year/version, document number or DOI, publication venue, and date.
- Use the registry to choose a source authoritative for that fact type. Do not choose solely by generic tier or domain.
- Attempt the canonical route within the retry budget. Classify access failures; do not repeatedly hammer a protected host.
- Follow the failover ladder. Prefer alternate endpoints of the same publisher, official republications, and formal journal versions before verified third-party copies.
- Verify document identity and version before extracting content from any fallback. Reject mismatches and incomplete copies.
- Check for a newer version, correction, update, retraction, or withdrawal before relying on the text.
- Extract only claims supported by the retrieved document. For recommendations, preserve population, intervention, conditions, recommendation strength, evidence certainty, and exceptions when reported.
- Cite the original issuer or formal publication. If a fallback carried the text, disclose the fallback separately instead of presenting it as a second source.
Latency-first fast failover
For an ordinary clinical-q-and-a request, keep the same identity standard but use the smallest path:
- Enter this skill only after the selected canonical route actually fails; do not preload failover references during a successful direct fetch.
401/403/412/CAPTCHA/login/paywall: do not retry the address. Move immediately to the best known L1-L3 route.- Timeout/
5xx: at most one retry or one approved fallback, not both repeatedly. When latency matters, start one hedged fallback after roughly two seconds and cancel the losing request after a valid copy arrives.
- Try only one fallback carrier for the same document in the fast path. If it is incomplete or identity cannot be established, return a bounded “正文未核验” result instead of exploring the whole ladder.
- Do not retrieve a second guideline merely to compensate for an access failure. The target remains the same document unless
source-verify explicitly chooses a new normative document.
Failover ladder
- L0 — Canonical original: issuing body or formal publisher page and complete attachment.
- L1 — Same-owner alternate: the same body's attachment host, mobile page, bulletin, archive, API, HTML/PDF counterpart, or journal subsite.
- L2 — Official republication: a complete copy on another government body, joint issuer, government portal, or official gazette.
- L3 — Formal publication: the guideline's journal HTML/PDF or DOI-bound publisher version.
- L4 — Verified complete copy: an authorized bibliographic database or complete copy with strong identity verification. Attribute claims to the original document.
- L5 — Metadata only: registry entry, index, abstract, news item, or interpretation. Use only to continue discovery or report that full text was not verified.
Do not skip identity verification between L2-L4. L5 cannot support document-level clinical claims.
Safe stopping rules
Stop precise extraction and state what remains unverified when any of these applies:
- year/version, issuer, or unique identifier conflicts;
- only a summary, snippet, partial screenshot, or truncated copy is available;
- tables, footnotes, recommendation conditions, appendices, or safety qualifications are missing;
- a possible correction, replacement, withdrawal, or newer version cannot be resolved;
- a high-risk drug or procedure claim cannot be located in a complete authoritative document.
When stopping, provide the verified metadata and a bounded statement such as “full text not verified; no precise recommendation or dosage extracted.” Do not fill gaps from memory.
Response record
For material medical claims, retain or report:
- document title, issuer/developer, year/version, document number or DOI;
- document type and the fact type it is authoritative for;
- canonical URL and the URL actually used to retrieve the text;
- fallback level and identity-verification result;
- publication/update status and last verification date;
- exact recommendation, section, table, or page locator when available;
- unresolved uncertainty or conflict.
