Retrieval-Augmented Guardrails for AI-Drafted Patient-Portal Messages: Error Taxonomy Construction and Large-Scale Evaluation

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Autori principali: Chen, Wenyuan, Haredasht, Fateme Nateghi, Black, Kameron C., Grolleau, Francois, Alsentzer, Emily, Chen, Jonathan H., Ma, Stephen P.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Chen, Wenyuan
Haredasht, Fateme Nateghi
Black, Kameron C.
Grolleau, Francois
Alsentzer, Emily
Chen, Jonathan H.
Ma, Stephen P.
author_facet Chen, Wenyuan
Haredasht, Fateme Nateghi
Black, Kameron C.
Grolleau, Francois
Alsentzer, Emily
Chen, Jonathan H.
Ma, Stephen P.
contents Asynchronous patient-clinician messaging via EHR portals is a growing source of clinician workload, prompting interest in large language models (LLMs) to assist with draft responses. However, LLM outputs may contain clinical inaccuracies, omissions, or tone mismatches, making robust evaluation essential. Our contributions are threefold: (1) we introduce a clinically grounded error ontology comprising 5 domains and 59 granular error codes, developed through inductive coding and expert adjudication; (2) we develop a retrieval-augmented evaluation pipeline (RAEC) that leverages semantically similar historical message-response pairs to improve judgment quality; and (3) we provide a two-stage prompting architecture using DSPy to enable scalable, interpretable, and hierarchical error detection. Our approach assesses the quality of drafts both in isolation and with reference to similar past message-response pairs retrieved from institutional archives. Using a two-stage DSPy pipeline, we compared baseline and reference-enhanced evaluations on over 1,500 patient messages. Retrieval context improved error identification in domains such as clinical completeness and workflow appropriateness. Human validation on 100 messages demonstrated superior agreement (concordance = 50% vs. 33%) and performance (F1 = 0.500 vs. 0.256) of context-enhanced labels vs. baseline, supporting the use of our RAEC pipeline as AI guardrails for patient messaging.
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Retrieval-Augmented Guardrails for AI-Drafted Patient-Portal Messages: Error Taxonomy Construction and Large-Scale Evaluation
Chen, Wenyuan
Haredasht, Fateme Nateghi
Black, Kameron C.
Grolleau, Francois
Alsentzer, Emily
Chen, Jonathan H.
Ma, Stephen P.
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
Asynchronous patient-clinician messaging via EHR portals is a growing source of clinician workload, prompting interest in large language models (LLMs) to assist with draft responses. However, LLM outputs may contain clinical inaccuracies, omissions, or tone mismatches, making robust evaluation essential. Our contributions are threefold: (1) we introduce a clinically grounded error ontology comprising 5 domains and 59 granular error codes, developed through inductive coding and expert adjudication; (2) we develop a retrieval-augmented evaluation pipeline (RAEC) that leverages semantically similar historical message-response pairs to improve judgment quality; and (3) we provide a two-stage prompting architecture using DSPy to enable scalable, interpretable, and hierarchical error detection. Our approach assesses the quality of drafts both in isolation and with reference to similar past message-response pairs retrieved from institutional archives. Using a two-stage DSPy pipeline, we compared baseline and reference-enhanced evaluations on over 1,500 patient messages. Retrieval context improved error identification in domains such as clinical completeness and workflow appropriateness. Human validation on 100 messages demonstrated superior agreement (concordance = 50% vs. 33%) and performance (F1 = 0.500 vs. 0.256) of context-enhanced labels vs. baseline, supporting the use of our RAEC pipeline as AI guardrails for patient messaging.
title Retrieval-Augmented Guardrails for AI-Drafted Patient-Portal Messages: Error Taxonomy Construction and Large-Scale Evaluation
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22565