TN-Eval: Rubric and Evaluation Protocols for Measuring the Quality of Behavioral Therapy Notes
This addresses a gap in evaluating therapy notes for legal compliance and patient care, though it is incremental in applying existing methods to a new domain.
The paper tackled the lack of quality standards for behavioral therapy notes by developing a rubric and evaluation protocols, finding that LLM-generated notes were preferred by therapists in blind tests despite issues like hallucination.
Behavioral therapy notes are important for both legal compliance and patient care. Unlike progress notes in physical health, quality standards for behavioral therapy notes remain underdeveloped. To address this gap, we collaborated with licensed therapists to design a comprehensive rubric for evaluating therapy notes across key dimensions: completeness, conciseness, and faithfulness. Further, we extend a public dataset of behavioral health conversations with therapist-written notes and LLM-generated notes, and apply our evaluation framework to measure their quality. We find that: (1) A rubric-based manual evaluation protocol offers more reliable and interpretable results than traditional Likert-scale annotations. (2) LLMs can mimic human evaluators in assessing completeness and conciseness but struggle with faithfulness. (3) Therapist-written notes often lack completeness and conciseness, while LLM-generated notes contain hallucination. Surprisingly, in a blind test, therapists prefer and judge LLM-generated notes to be superior to therapist-written notes.