From Feedback to Checklists: Grounded Evaluation of AI-Generated Clinical Notes

Karen Zhou, John Michael Giorgi, Pranav Mani, Peng Xu, Davis Liang, Chenhao Tan


Abstract
AI-generated clinical notes are increasingly used in healthcare, but evaluating their quality remains a challenge due to high subjectivity and limited scalability of expert review. Existing automated metrics often fail to align with real-world physician preferences. To address this, we propose a pipeline that systematically distills real user feedback into structured checklists for note evaluation. These checklists are designed to be interpretable, grounded in human feedback, and enforceable by LLM-based evaluators. Using deidentified data from over 21,000 clinical encounters (prepared in accordance with the HIPAA safe harbor standard) from a deployed AI medical scribe system, we show that our feedback-derived checklist outperforms a baseline approach in our offline evaluations in coverage, diversity, and predictive power for human ratings. Extensive experiments confirm the checklist’s robustness to quality-degrading perturbations, significant alignment with clinician preferences, and practical value as an evaluation methodology. In offline research settings, our checklist offers a practical tool for flagging notes that may fall short of our defined quality standards.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-industry.104
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou (China)
Editors:
Saloni Potdar, Lina Rojas-Barahona, Sebastien Montella
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1485–1499
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-industry.104/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Karen Zhou, John Michael Giorgi, Pranav Mani, Peng Xu, Davis Liang, and Chenhao Tan. 2025. From Feedback to Checklists: Grounded Evaluation of AI-Generated Clinical Notes. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track, pages 1485–1499, Suzhou (China). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
From Feedback to Checklists: Grounded Evaluation of AI-Generated Clinical Notes (Zhou et al., EMNLP 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-industry.104.pdf