A Systematic Analysis of Large Language Models with RAG-enabled Dynamic Prompting for Medical Error Detection and Correction

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Ahmed, Farzad, Jerome, Joniel Augustine, Yetisgen, Meliha, Uzuner, Özlem
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866911288093835264
author Ahmed, Farzad
Jerome, Joniel Augustine
Yetisgen, Meliha
Uzuner, Özlem
author_facet Ahmed, Farzad
Jerome, Joniel Augustine
Yetisgen, Meliha
Uzuner, Özlem
contents Objective: Clinical documentation contains factual, diagnostic, and management errors that can compromise patient safety. Large language models (LLMs) may help detect and correct such errors, but their behavior under different prompting strategies remains unclear. We evaluate zero-shot prompting, static prompting with random exemplars (SPR), and retrieval-augmented dynamic prompting (RDP) for three subtasks of medical error processing: error flag detection, error sentence detection, and error correction. Methods: Using the MEDEC dataset, we evaluated nine instruction-tuned LLMs (GPT, Claude, Gemini, and OpenAI o-series models). We measured performance using accuracy, recall, false-positive rate (FPR), and an aggregate score of ROUGE-1, BLEURT, and BERTScore for error correction. We also analyzed example outputs to identify failure modes and differences between LLM and clinician reasoning. Results: Zero-shot prompting showed low recall in both detection tasks, often missing abbreviation-heavy or atypical errors. SPR improved recall but increased FPR. Across all nine LLMs, RDP reduced FPR by about 15 percent, improved recall by 5 to 10 percent in error sentence detection, and generated more contextually accurate corrections. Conclusion: Across diverse LLMs, RDP outperforms zero-shot and SPR prompting. Using retrieved exemplars improves detection accuracy, reduces false positives, and enhances the reliability of medical error correction.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_19858
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Systematic Analysis of Large Language Models with RAG-enabled Dynamic Prompting for Medical Error Detection and Correction
Ahmed, Farzad
Jerome, Joniel Augustine
Yetisgen, Meliha
Uzuner, Özlem
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Objective: Clinical documentation contains factual, diagnostic, and management errors that can compromise patient safety. Large language models (LLMs) may help detect and correct such errors, but their behavior under different prompting strategies remains unclear. We evaluate zero-shot prompting, static prompting with random exemplars (SPR), and retrieval-augmented dynamic prompting (RDP) for three subtasks of medical error processing: error flag detection, error sentence detection, and error correction. Methods: Using the MEDEC dataset, we evaluated nine instruction-tuned LLMs (GPT, Claude, Gemini, and OpenAI o-series models). We measured performance using accuracy, recall, false-positive rate (FPR), and an aggregate score of ROUGE-1, BLEURT, and BERTScore for error correction. We also analyzed example outputs to identify failure modes and differences between LLM and clinician reasoning. Results: Zero-shot prompting showed low recall in both detection tasks, often missing abbreviation-heavy or atypical errors. SPR improved recall but increased FPR. Across all nine LLMs, RDP reduced FPR by about 15 percent, improved recall by 5 to 10 percent in error sentence detection, and generated more contextually accurate corrections. Conclusion: Across diverse LLMs, RDP outperforms zero-shot and SPR prompting. Using retrieved exemplars improves detection accuracy, reduces false positives, and enhances the reliability of medical error correction.
title A Systematic Analysis of Large Language Models with RAG-enabled Dynamic Prompting for Medical Error Detection and Correction
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19858