When the Domain Expert Has No Time and the LLM Developer Has No Clinical Expertise: Real-World Lessons from LLM Co-Design in a Safety-Net Hospital

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Kothari, Avni, Vossler, Patrick, Digitale, Jean, Forouzannia, Mohammad, Rosenberg, Elise, Lee, Michele, Bryant, Jennee, Molina, Melanie, Marks, James, Zier, Lucas, Feng, Jean
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Kothari, Avni
Vossler, Patrick
Digitale, Jean
Forouzannia, Mohammad
Rosenberg, Elise
Lee, Michele
Bryant, Jennee
Molina, Melanie
Marks, James
Zier, Lucas
Feng, Jean
author_facet Kothari, Avni
Vossler, Patrick
Digitale, Jean
Forouzannia, Mohammad
Rosenberg, Elise
Lee, Michele
Bryant, Jennee
Molina, Melanie
Marks, James
Zier, Lucas
Feng, Jean
contents Large language models (LLMs) have the potential to address social and behavioral determinants of health by transforming labor intensive workflows in resource-constrained settings. Creating LLM-based applications that serve the needs of underserved communities requires a deep understanding of their local context, but it is often the case that neither LLMs nor their developers possess this local expertise, and the experts in these communities often face severe time/resource constraints. This creates a disconnect: how can one engage in meaningful co-design of an LLM-based application for an under-resourced community when the communication channel between the LLM developer and domain expert is constrained? We explored this question through a real-world case study, in which our data science team sought to partner with social workers at a safety net hospital to build an LLM application that summarizes patients' social needs. Whereas prior works focus on the challenge of prompt tuning, we found that the most critical challenge in this setting is the careful and precise specification of \what information to surface to providers so that the LLM application is accurate, comprehensive, and verifiable. Here we present a novel co-design framework for settings with limited access to domain experts, in which the summary generation task is first decomposed into individually-optimizable attributes and then each attribute is efficiently refined and validated through a multi-tier cascading approach.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_08504
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle When the Domain Expert Has No Time and the LLM Developer Has No Clinical Expertise: Real-World Lessons from LLM Co-Design in a Safety-Net Hospital
Kothari, Avni
Vossler, Patrick
Digitale, Jean
Forouzannia, Mohammad
Rosenberg, Elise
Lee, Michele
Bryant, Jennee
Molina, Melanie
Marks, James
Zier, Lucas
Feng, Jean
Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Large language models (LLMs) have the potential to address social and behavioral determinants of health by transforming labor intensive workflows in resource-constrained settings. Creating LLM-based applications that serve the needs of underserved communities requires a deep understanding of their local context, but it is often the case that neither LLMs nor their developers possess this local expertise, and the experts in these communities often face severe time/resource constraints. This creates a disconnect: how can one engage in meaningful co-design of an LLM-based application for an under-resourced community when the communication channel between the LLM developer and domain expert is constrained? We explored this question through a real-world case study, in which our data science team sought to partner with social workers at a safety net hospital to build an LLM application that summarizes patients' social needs. Whereas prior works focus on the challenge of prompt tuning, we found that the most critical challenge in this setting is the careful and precise specification of \what information to surface to providers so that the LLM application is accurate, comprehensive, and verifiable. Here we present a novel co-design framework for settings with limited access to domain experts, in which the summary generation task is first decomposed into individually-optimizable attributes and then each attribute is efficiently refined and validated through a multi-tier cascading approach.
title When the Domain Expert Has No Time and the LLM Developer Has No Clinical Expertise: Real-World Lessons from LLM Co-Design in a Safety-Net Hospital
topic Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08504