OpenAIs HealthBench in Action: Evaluating an LLM-Based Medical Assistant on Realistic Clinical Queries

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02594v1
• Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2025 09:51:41 GMT
• Title: OpenAIs HealthBench in Action: Evaluating an LLM-Based Medical Assistant on Realistic Clinical Queries
• Authors: Sandhanakrishnan Ravichandran, Shivesh Kumar, Rogerio Corga Da Silva, Miguel Romano, Reinhard Berkels, Michiel van der Heijden, Olivier Fail, Valentine Emmanuel Gnanapragasam,
• Abstract summary: We evaluate our agentic, RAG-based clinical support assistant, DR.INFO, using HealthBench.<n>On the Hard subset of 1,000 challenging examples, DR.INFO achieves a HealthBench score of 0.51.<n>In a separate 100-sample evaluation against similar agentic RAG assistants, it maintains a performance lead with a health-bench score of 0.54.
• Score: 2.2807344448218507
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Evaluating large language models (LLMs) on their ability to generate high-quality, accurate, situationally aware answers to clinical questions requires going beyond conventional benchmarks to assess how these systems behave in complex, high-stake clincal scenarios. Traditional evaluations are often limited to multiple-choice questions that fail to capture essential competencies such as contextual reasoning, awareness and uncertainty handling etc. To address these limitations, we evaluate our agentic, RAG-based clinical support assistant, DR.INFO, using HealthBench, a rubric-driven benchmark composed of open-ended, expert-annotated health conversations. On the Hard subset of 1,000 challenging examples, DR.INFO achieves a HealthBench score of 0.51, substantially outperforming leading frontier LLMs (GPT-5, o3, Grok 3, GPT-4, Gemini 2.5, etc.) across all behavioral axes (accuracy, completeness, instruction following, etc.). In a separate 100-sample evaluation against similar agentic RAG assistants (OpenEvidence, Pathway.md), it maintains a performance lead with a health-bench score of 0.54. These results highlight DR.INFOs strengths in communication, instruction following, and accuracy, while also revealing areas for improvement in context awareness and completeness of a response. Overall, the findings underscore the utility of behavior-level, rubric-based evaluation for building a reliable and trustworthy AI-enabled clinical support assistant.

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