Toward Human Centered Interactive Clinical Question Answering System

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Albassam, Dina
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909622311321600
author Albassam, Dina
author_facet Albassam, Dina
contents Unstructured clinical notes contain essential patient information but are challenging for physicians to search and interpret efficiently. Although large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in question answering (QA), most existing systems lack transparency, usability, and alignment with clinical workflows. This work introduces an interactive QA system that enables physicians to query clinical notes via text or voice and receive extractive answers highlighted directly in the note for traceability. The system was built using OpenAI models with zero-shot prompting and evaluated across multiple metrics, including exact string match, word overlap, SentenceTransformer similarity, and BERTScore. Results show that while exact match scores ranged from 47 to 62 percent, semantic similarity scores exceeded 87 percent, indicating strong contextual alignment even when wording varied. To assess usability, the system was also evaluated using simulated clinical personas. Seven diverse physician and nurse personas interacted with the system across scenario-based tasks and provided structured feedback. The evaluations highlighted strengths in intuitive design and answer accessibility, alongside opportunities for enhancing explanation clarity.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_18928
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Toward Human Centered Interactive Clinical Question Answering System
Albassam, Dina
Human-Computer Interaction
Unstructured clinical notes contain essential patient information but are challenging for physicians to search and interpret efficiently. Although large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in question answering (QA), most existing systems lack transparency, usability, and alignment with clinical workflows. This work introduces an interactive QA system that enables physicians to query clinical notes via text or voice and receive extractive answers highlighted directly in the note for traceability. The system was built using OpenAI models with zero-shot prompting and evaluated across multiple metrics, including exact string match, word overlap, SentenceTransformer similarity, and BERTScore. Results show that while exact match scores ranged from 47 to 62 percent, semantic similarity scores exceeded 87 percent, indicating strong contextual alignment even when wording varied. To assess usability, the system was also evaluated using simulated clinical personas. Seven diverse physician and nurse personas interacted with the system across scenario-based tasks and provided structured feedback. The evaluations highlighted strengths in intuitive design and answer accessibility, alongside opportunities for enhancing explanation clarity.
title Toward Human Centered Interactive Clinical Question Answering System
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18928