Authority-Preserving Evaluation of Medical Vision-Language Assistants

Medical vision-language models can propose how urgently a skin lesion should be reviewed, but the local service retains authority to accept or replace that proposal under referral policy, capacity, and locally held patient context. Proposal quality and selected-action quality are therefore distinct evaluation targets, and benchmark evidence transfers between them only when local review preserves the expected action score. We introduce AuthEval, a logging and evaluation framework that records both actions, scores the selected action under declared local criteria, and, where feasible, scores the declined proposal under the same rule. It reports the resulting authority gap only when the record supports it. Because the gap is the product of the proposal-change rate and the mean score change on changed cases, that rate alone determines neither its magnitude nor its sign. On ISIC 2019, with MedGemma and simulated local review, two constraint regimes with similar change rates produced an optimistic image-equal gap under capacity (+0.744 simulator units) but no detectable gap under safety. The declared evaluation unit also mattered: under mixed constraints the gap reversed from +0.374 to -0.206 when weighting shifted from image to lesion-aware cluster. AuthEval thus clarifies whether a study's records support claims about the model, the workflow, or both.