Consumer-to-Clinical Language Shifts in Ambient AI Draft Notes and Clinician-Finalized Documentation: A Multi-level Analysis

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 18 Mar 2026] Consumer-to-Clinical Language Shifts in Ambient AI Draft Notes and Clinician-Finalized Documentation: A Multi-level Analysis Ha Na Cho, Yawen Guo, Sairam Sutari, Emilie Chow, Steven Tam, Danielle Perret, Deepti Pandita, Kai Zheng Ambient AI generates draft clinical notes from patient-clinician conversations, often using lay or consumer-oriented phrasing to support patient understanding instead of standardized clinical terminology. How clinicians revise these drafts for professional documentation conventions remains unclear. We quantified clinician editing for consumer-to- clinical normalization using a dictionary-confirmed transformation framework. We analyzed 71,173 AI-draft and finalized-note section pairs from 34,726 encounters. Confirmed transformations were defined as replacing a consumer expression with its dictionary-mapped clinical equivalent in the same section. Editing significantly reduced terminology density across all sections (p < 0.001). The Assessment and Plan accounted for the largest transformation volume (59.3%). Our analysis identified 7,576 transformation events across 4,114 note sections (5.8%), representing 1.2% consumer-term deletions. Transformation intensity varied across individual clinicians (p < 0.001). Overall, clinician post-editing demonstrates consistent shifts from conversational phrasing toward standardized, section- appropriate clinical terminology, supporting section-aware ambient AI design. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2603.18327 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2603.18327v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.18327 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Ha Na Cho [view email] [v1] Wed, 18 Mar 2026 22:20:06 UTC (2,774 KB) Access Paper: view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)