Two audiences, two documents
The reviewer wants the full account: how it was developed, on what data, evaluated how, with what limitations. That document should exist and should be thorough, and it will be read carefully by a small number of people, once.
The clinician wants to know whether to act on the thing currently on their screen. They have perhaps thirty seconds and they are not going to open a document at all unless it is one click away and short.
Serving the first audience with a long document and assuming the second is covered is the most common failure in AI documentation.
What the short version needs
What it is for, in one sentence, in clinical terms rather than modelling terms. Not 'a gradient-boosted classifier for adverse event prediction' but what question it is trying to help answer.
Who it was built for. Which patients, which settings. This is the single most useful line, because the most common misuse of a clinical model is applying it correctly to a population it was never developed on.
What it does not cover, explicitly. Any known population, condition or circumstance where the output should be treated with more caution, stated plainly rather than buried in a limitations section.
What to do when you disagree which, as we have written elsewhere, should be a first-class action rather than a hidden one.
Avoid precision the model does not have
A number carried to two decimal places implies a confidence in the calibration that is rarely warranted, and clinicians reasonably read precision as a claim.
Bands, with the conditions that would move something between bands, communicate the actual state of knowledge more honestly and are easier to act on.
The same applies to the description of the training data. 'Developed on a large dataset' is not a fact anybody can use. Saying which settings and which kinds of patient it covered lets a clinician judge whether their patient is one of them, which is the only question they were asking.
Say when it was last reviewed
A model description without a date is a claim about the present made at an unknown point in the past. Given that drift is the failure mode we worry about most, the review date is a material fact, not metadata.
It also creates a useful obligation: a visible date that is getting old is a prompt to somebody.
Put it where the output is
Documentation in a separate portal is documentation that does not exist at the moment of decision. The short version belongs one interaction away from the advisory itself, and it should open without leaving the workflow.
This is a small implementation detail that determines whether any of the above matters at all.
Write it before you build
Drafting the one-page description early is a useful forcing function. If the purpose cannot be stated in a sentence, or the intended population cannot be described crisply, that is a design problem showing up in a writing exercise.
Several proposals have not survived being written down, which we count as the process working.
The discipline transfers, too. A team that has practised describing a model in a paragraph tends to describe the rest of its work more clearly, because the habit is really about knowing what a thing is for before building it.
If any of the above matches a problem you are dealing with, we are happy to go deeper than a blog post reasonably can.