Assessing the Quality of AI-Generated Clinical Notes: A Validated Evaluation of a Large Language Model Scribe

In medical practices across the United States, physicians have begun implementing generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools to perform the function of scribes in order to reduce the burden of documenting clinical encounters. Despite their widespread use, no established methods exist to gauge the quality of AI scribes. To address this gap, we developed a blinded study comparing the relative performance of large language model (LLM) generated clinical notes with those from field experts based on audio-recorded clinical encounters. Quantitative metrics from the Physician Documentation Quality Instrument (PDQI9) provided a framework to measure note quality, which we adapted to assess relative performance of AI generated notes. Clinical experts spanning 5 medical specialties used the PDQI9 tool to evaluate specialist-drafted Gold notes and LLM authored Ambient notes. Two evaluators from each specialty scored notes drafted from a total of 97 patient visits. We found uniformly high inter rater agreement (RWG greater than 0.7) between evaluators in general medicine, orthopedics, and obstetrics and gynecology, and moderate (RWG 0.5 to 0.7) to high inter rater agreement in pediatrics and cardiology. We found a modest yet significant difference in the overall note quality, wherein Gold notes achieved a score of 4.25 out of 5 and Ambient notes scored 4.20 out of 5 (p = 0.04). Our findings support the use of the PDQI9 instrument as a practical method to gauge the quality of LLM authored notes, as compared to human-authored notes.