JEDA: Query-Free Clinical Order Search from Ambient Dialogues

Abstract

Clinical conversations mix explicit directives (order a chest X-ray) with implicit reasoning (the cough worsened overnight, we should check for pneumonia). Many systems rely on LLM rewriting, adding latency, instability, and opacity that hinder real-time ordering. We present JEDA (Joint Embedding for Direct and Ambient clinical orders), a domain-initialized bi-encoder that retrieves canonical orders directly and, in a query-free mode, encodes a short rolling window of ambient dialogue to trigger retrieval. Initialized from PubMedBERT and fine-tuned with a duplicate-safe contrastive objective, JEDA aligns heterogeneous expressions of intent to shared order concepts. Training uses constrained LLM guidance to tie each signed order to complementary formulations (command only, context only, command+context, context+reasoning), producing clearer inter-order separation, tighter query extendash order coupling, and stronger generalization. The query-free mode is noise-resilient, reducing sensitivity to disfluencies and ASR errors by conditioning on a short window rather than a single utterance. Deployed in practice, JEDA yields large gains and substantially outperforms its base encoder and recent open embedders (Linq Embed Mistral, SFR Embedding, GTE Qwen, BGE large, Embedding Gemma). The result is a fast, interpretable, LLM-free retrieval layer that links ambient context to actionable clinical orders in real time.