MedicalOS: An LLM Agent based Operating System for Digital Healthcare
This addresses the burden on clinicians in managing multiple tools and administrative tasks, offering a scalable solution for workflow automation in healthcare, though it is incremental as it builds on existing LLM agent capabilities with domain-specific adaptations.
The paper tackles the problem of complex and inefficient digital healthcare systems by introducing MedicalOS, an LLM agent-based operating system that translates natural language instructions into clinical commands, achieving high diagnostic accuracy and consistent report generation across 214 patient cases in 22 specialties.
Decades' advances in digital health technologies, such as electronic health records, have largely streamlined routine clinical processes. Yet, most these systems are still hard to learn and use: Clinicians often face the burden of managing multiple tools, repeating manual actions for each patient, navigating complicated UI trees to locate functions, and spending significant time on administration instead of caring for patients. The recent rise of large language model (LLM) based agents demonstrates exceptional capability in coding and computer operation, revealing the potential for humans to interact with operating systems and software not by direct manipulation, but by instructing agents through natural language. This shift highlights the need for an abstraction layer, an agent-computer interface, that translates human language into machine-executable commands. In digital healthcare, however, requires a more domain-specific abstractions that strictly follow trusted clinical guidelines and procedural standards to ensure safety, transparency, and compliance. To address this need, we present \textbf{MedicalOS}, a unified agent-based operational system designed as such a domain-specific abstract layer for healthcare. It translates human instructions into pre-defined digital healthcare commands, such as patient inquiry, history retrieval, exam management, report generation, referrals, treatment planning, that we wrapped as off-the-shelf tools using machine languages (e.g., Python, APIs, MCP, Linux). We empirically validate MedicalOS on 214 patient cases across 22 specialties, demonstrating high diagnostic accuracy and confidence, clinically sound examination requests, and consistent generation of structured reports and medication recommendations. These results highlight MedicalOS as a trustworthy and scalable foundation for advancing workflow automation in clinical practice.