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The Golden Opportunity or the Cutting Room Floor? Quantifying and Characterizing the Loss and Addition of Social Determinants of Health during Clinician Editing of Ambient AI Documentation

Kim, S.; Guo, Y.; Sutari, S.; Chow, E.; Tam, S.; Perret, D.; Pandita, D.; Zheng, K.

2026-04-22 health systems and quality improvement
10.64898/2026.04.20.26351322 medRxiv
Show abstract

Social determinants of health (SDoH) are important for clinical care, but it remains unclear how much AI-captured social context is preserved after clinician editing in ambient documentation workflows. We retrospectively analyzed 75,133 paired ambient AI-drafted and clinician-finalized note sections from ambulatory care at a large academic health system. Using a rule-based NLP pipeline, we extracted 21 SDoH categories and quantified retention, deletion, and addition. SDoH appeared in 25.2% of AI drafts versus 17.2% of final notes. At the mention level, AI captured 29,991 SDoH mentions, of which 45.1% were deleted, 54.9% were retained with clinicians adding 3,583 new mentions. Insurance and marital status were most often deleted, whereas substance use and physical activity were more often retained. Deletion patterns also varied by specialty, supporting the need for specialty-aware ambient AI systems.

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