Case-Specific Rubrics for Clinical AI Evaluation: Methodology, Validation, and LLM-Clinician Agreement Across 823 Encounters
- URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.24710v1
- Date: Mon, 27 Apr 2026 17:17:56 GMT
- Title: Case-Specific Rubrics for Clinical AI Evaluation: Methodology, Validation, and LLM-Clinician Agreement Across 823 Encounters
- Abstract summary: Methods requiring expert review per scoring instance are too slow and expensive for safe, iterative deployment.<n>Twenty clinicians authored 1,646 rubrics for 823 clinical cases across primary care, psychiatry, oncology, and behavioral health.<n>Case-specific rubrics offer a path for clinical AI evaluation that preserves expert judgment while enabling automation at three orders lower cost.
- Score: 3.018184429993625
- License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- Abstract: Objective. Clinical AI documentation systems require evaluation methodologies that are clinically valid, economically viable, and sensitive to iterative changes. Methods requiring expert review per scoring instance are too slow and expensive for safe, iterative deployment. We present a case-specific, clinician-authored rubric methodology for clinical AI evaluation and examine whether LLM-generated rubrics can approximate clinician agreement. Materials and Methods. Twenty clinicians authored 1,646 rubrics for 823 clinical cases (736 real-world, 87 synthetic) across primary care, psychiatry, oncology, and behavioral health. Each rubric was validated by confirming that an LLM-based scoring agent consistently scored clinician-preferred outputs higher than rejected ones. Seven versions of an EHR-embedded AI agent for clinicians were evaluated across all cases. Results. Clinician-authored rubrics discriminated effectively between high- and low-quality outputs (median score gap: 82.9%) with high scoring stability (median range: 0.00%). Median scores improved from 84% to 95%. In later experiments, clinician-LLM ranking agreement (tau: 0.42-0.46) matched or exceeded clinician-clinician agreement (tau: 0.38-0.43), attributable to both ceiling compression and LLM rubric improvement. Discussion. This convergence supports incorporating LLM rubrics alongside clinician-authored ones. At roughly 1,000 times lower cost, LLM rubrics enable substantially greater evaluation coverage, while continued clinical authorship grounds evaluation in expert judgment. Ceiling compression poses a methodological challenge for future inter-rater agreement studies. Conclusion. Case-specific rubrics offer a path for clinical AI evaluation that preserves expert judgment while enabling automation at three orders lower cost. Clinician-authored rubrics establish the baseline against which LLM rubrics are validated.
Related papers
- ResidencyRL: Reinforcement Learning in Simulated Clinical Environments [53.76751756107077]
We present ResidencyRL, a reinforcement learning (RL) method for training clinical artificial intelligence (AI) agents through simulated multi-turn clinical encounters.<n>On heldout evaluations, the ResidencyRL agent improves diagnostic accuracy by 7.0% under adversarial conditions.<n>Blinded expert clinicians validated these gains, preferring the trained agent in 87.6% of side-by-side comparisons.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2026-08-07T17:04:41Z) - Clinician-Level Agreement Without Clinical Caution: LLM Evaluator Limits in Medical AI Benchmarking [27.829988205900055]
We introduce MedQADE, the first standardised open-response clinical benchmark for German.<n>The top-performing evaluator model, Gemini 3 Flash, reached alignment consistent with the physician ceiling.<n>Despite this statistical alignment, automated evaluators exhibited near-absent clinical metacognition.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2026-07-01T15:55:31Z) - A Decade-Scale Benchmark Evaluating LLMs' Clinical Practice Guidelines Detection and Adherence in Multi-turn Conversations [60.2076951536797]
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in healthcare scenarios.<n>It is unclear to which extend LLMs could identify and adhere to clinical guidelines during conversations.<n>CPGBench is an automated framework benchmarking the clinical guideline detection and adherence capabilities of LLMs.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2026-03-26T09:00:55Z) - Deployment and Evaluation of an EHR-integrated, Large Language Model-Powered Tool to Triage Surgical Patients [3.381441580878978]
Surgical co-management (SCM) is an evidence-based model in which hospitalists jointly manage patients alongside surgical teams.<n>SCM Navigator categorized patients as appropriate, not appropriate, or possibly appropriate for SCM.<n>Since deployment, 6,193 cases have been triaged, of which 1,582 (23%) were recommended for hospitalist consultation.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2026-03-18T00:36:58Z) - LiveClin: A Live Clinical Benchmark without Leakage [50.45415584327275]
LiveClin is a live benchmark designed for approximating real-world clinical practice.<n>We transform authentic patient cases into complex, multimodal evaluation scenarios that span the entire clinical pathway.<n>Our evaluation of 26 models on LiveClin reveals the profound difficulty of these real-world scenarios, with the top-performing model achieving a Case Accuracy of just 35.7%.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2026-02-18T03:59:46Z) - ClinDEF: A Dynamic Evaluation Framework for Large Language Models in Clinical Reasoning [58.01333341218153]
We propose ClinDEF, a dynamic framework for assessing clinical reasoning in LLMs through simulated diagnostic dialogues.<n>Our method generates patient cases and facilitates multi-turn interactions between an LLM-based doctor and an automated patient agent.<n>Experiments show that ClinDEF effectively exposes critical clinical reasoning gaps in state-of-the-art LLMs.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-12-29T12:58:58Z) - WER is Unaware: Assessing How ASR Errors Distort Clinical Understanding in Patient Facing Dialogue [3.468314243424983]
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is increasingly deployed in clinical dialogue.<n>Standard evaluations still rely heavily on Error Error Rate (WER)<n>This paper challenges that standard, investigating whether WER or other common metrics correlate with clinical impact of transcription errors.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-11-20T16:59:20Z) - Patient-Centered Summarization Framework for AI Clinical Summarization: A Mixed-Methods Design [23.21070690395588]
We propose a new standard for Artificial Intelligence (AI) clinical summarization tasks: Patient-Centered Summaries (PCS)<n>Our objective was to develop a framework to generate PCS that capture patient values and ensure clinical utility.<n>Five open-source LLMs generated summaries for 72 consultations using zero-shot and few-shot prompting.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-10-31T15:08:18Z) - MedHELM: Holistic Evaluation of Large Language Models for Medical Tasks [47.486705282473984]
Large language models (LLMs) achieve near-perfect scores on medical exams.<n>These evaluations inadequately reflect complexity and diversity of real-world clinical practice.<n>We introduce MedHELM, an evaluation framework for assessing LLM performance for medical tasks.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-05-26T22:55:49Z) - AI Hospital: Benchmarking Large Language Models in a Multi-agent Medical Interaction Simulator [69.51568871044454]
We introduce textbfAI Hospital, a framework simulating dynamic medical interactions between emphDoctor as player and NPCs.
This setup allows for realistic assessments of LLMs in clinical scenarios.
We develop the Multi-View Medical Evaluation benchmark, utilizing high-quality Chinese medical records and NPCs.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2024-02-15T06:46:48Z)
This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.
This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.