Verification Turns Capability Gaps into Routing Decisions: Small Language Models for Clinical Documentation

Abstract

Clinical note generation from doctor--patient dialogue is high-volume and hallucination-intolerant: a fabricated laboratory value can create patient-safety risk, not a quality regression. We ask whether an agentic \emph{verification} architecture, rather than generator scale, can make a small language model viable here. Holding a four-evaluator verification stack and refinement policy fixed and swapping only the generator between a 4B-parameter model with a QLoRA adapter and a frontier baseline, the small model reaches $0.984$ claim-level factual entailment against $0.992$ and comes within $3.3$ points on completeness, generating entirely on-device. Its deficit is confined to \emph{inter-section structural fidelity}---arrangement rather than clinical comprehension, and the axis on which it also falls furthest below the corpus's reference notes. Because that deficit is an explicit verifier decision rather than a silent quality difference, it becomes a routing policy: run the small model by default, escalate what the verifier rejects. Measured end to end, that it achieved a similiar verified-rate acceptance to the frontier-only acceptance in this test set ($99.6\%$ vs.\ $98.4\%$ over $250$ encounters) while routing $62$, documenting three quarters without a frontier \emph{generation} call. Ablating the loop separates architecture from scale: unrefined, the small model is accepted on $26.8\%$ of encounters and the frontier model on $74.8\%$, so verification does the most work where the generator is weakest. We also contribute section-scoped refinement, which preserves unflagged sections by construction rather than instruction, and find the baseline is not uniformly stronger---its provider refused two trauma-related transcripts the on-device model handled and certified, one facet of a provider dependency a served adapter does not carry.