Evaluating LLM-as-a-Judge for Medical Term Simplification

Beyond accuracy: evaluating the reliability of large language models for medical assessment

For automated assessment metadata extraction, reliability rather than accuracy determines whether an LLM can be deployed, and national origin is not a meaningful predictor.

Human evaluators vs. LLM-as-a-Judge: toward scalable evaluation of GenAI in global health.

Evaluating generative AI output remains a critical bottleneck for safe and scalable deployment of AI in healthcare. Expert clinical judgement is often presented as the gold standard, but human assessment is costly and inconsistent. LLM-as-judge systems, i.e., leveraging AI to evaluate other AI outputs, have been proposed, yet their reliability in global health remains untested. We compared five LLM judges and six human clinicians in evaluating responses to questions posed by Rwandan health workers. The highest-performing LLM-judge (Claude-4.1-Opus) matched human evaluators on only four of eleven evaluation criteria, with other models scoring too leniently (Gemini-2.5-Pro) or too harshly (GPT-5). Constructing LLM-juries to balance model-specific biases improved agreement on only one additional criterion. Notably, performance and cost-effectiveness fell when moving from English to Kinyarwanda. Overall, while LLM-judges show promise, their inability to handle linguistic and cultural context is a critical limitation, underscoring the need for further investment in scalable evaluation solutions.

Uncertainty-aware extraction of clinical findings from Finnish EHRs using open large language models

JudgEHR: LLM-Guided Cohort Inference for Clinical Decision Confidence Estimation

Clinical decisions, such as diagnosing conditions, prescribing medications, and recommending procedures, are rarely made with absolute certainty. Instead, they reflect probabilistic judgments shaped by evolving patient information and incomplete evidence. However, current EHR systems and knowledge graphs encode such decisions as deterministic triples, lacking a mechanism to represent the subjective confidence inherent in clinical reasoning. We present JudgEHR, a framework for clinical decision confidence estimation that leverages large language models (LLMs) to perform cohort-based collective inference over structured patient records by representing clinical events as knowledge graph triples and integrating them into LLM prompts. JudgEHR groups related clinical concepts into cohorts using LLM-driven relational inference, and then jointly evaluates the plausibility of all clinical decision triples within each cohort by considering patient visit history and background medical knowledge. We apply our method to the MIMIC-III dataset. Our statistical analysis shows that JudgEHR generates semantically consistent confidence scores, with similar concepts receiving closer values, whereas dissimilar replacements yield large confidence differences. Experiments on the MIMIC-III dataset show that incorporating the confidence into a zero-shot LLM-based pipeline improves relative AUROC by ${1 4. 6 \%}$ and AUPRC by 21.8% on the mortality prediction task.

Effect of evaluation prompt strategies on LLM-as-a-judge reliability in critical care.

Bottom-up incremental scoring showed the closest alignment with human assessment in clinical AI evaluation, underscoring the need for standardised prompt architectures in clinical AI evaluation.

KREL: Automatic Medical Coding via Knowledge-Guided Reasoning over Clinical Evidence with LLMs

Automatic Medical Coding (AMC), which assigns standardized International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes to clinical notes, is essential for medical reimbursement, quality reporting, and clinical research. Existing pre-trained language model (PLM)-based methods typically formulate AMC as an extreme multi-label classification problem over a predefined code set, while recent large language model (LLM)-based approaches instead frame it as generation or multi-step reasoning. However, key challenges remain, including the extreme length of clinical notes that hinders effective interpretation, the vast ICD label space, and complex coding rules that are not explicitly captured by LLMs. In this work, we propose Knowledge-Guided Reasoning over Clinical Evidence with LLMs (KREL), a framework that leverages LLMs for clinical text understanding and reasoning while integrating external ICD coding guidelines as structured knowledge. This design enables tight coupling between domain knowledge and LLM reasoning, reducing hallucinations and improving compliance with coding standards. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that KREL consistently outperforms strong PLM-based and state-of-the-art LLM-based baselines.