Conversation as Measurement in Clinical Encounters: Observable Phase Structure, Partially Observable Patient State
Many modern AI systems analyze conversational traces to infer aspects of human interaction and state, implicitly assuming that such information is recoverable from conversation. We study observability: whether a target is recoverable from conversational transcripts alone. Observability is difficult to assess because transcripts may provide only a partial view of many targets, and large-scale analysis requires model-based annotation, making true limits of the conversational signal hard to distinguish from annotator error. We therefore study clinical encounters, where patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) provide an external anchor for patient state, and visits follow broadly structured patterns. We study observability of patient state and conversational phase structure using 439 real-world clinical encounter transcripts spanning 134 hours, including 245 ENT transcripts paired with 273 PROM surveys. We operationalize patient state using PROM scores for voice, cough, and swallowing; phase structure using conversational phase segmentation. To make these analyses credible at scale, we use a PHI-compliant GPT-5 deployment for transcript annotation and conduct 40 hours of manual validation, reducing the risk that apparent limits of observability simply reflect annotator error. Our core finding is an observability asymmetry: phase structure is observable and useful for characterizing clinical encounter organization, while patient state is only partially observable, even in a setting designed to elicit patient symptoms and experiences, cautioning against transcript-only inference of human state.