Importance of Prompt Optimisation for Error Detection in Medical Notes Using Language Models
This addresses errors in medical text that can cause delays or incorrect treatment for patients, representing an incremental improvement through prompt optimization.
The paper tackles the problem of error detection in medical notes by exploring prompt optimization for language models, showing that automatic optimization with Genetic-Pareto improves accuracy from 0.669 to 0.785 with GPT-5 and from 0.578 to 0.690 with Qwen3-32B, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the MEDEC benchmark.
Errors in medical text can cause delays or even result in incorrect treatment for patients. Recently, language models have shown promise in their ability to automatically detect errors in medical text, an ability that has the opportunity to significantly benefit healthcare systems. In this paper, we explore the importance of prompt optimisation for small and large language models when applied to the task of error detection. We perform rigorous experiments and analysis across frontier language models and open-source language models. We show that automatic prompt optimisation with Genetic-Pareto (GEPA) improves error detection over the baseline accuracy performance from 0.669 to 0.785 with GPT-5 and 0.578 to 0.690 with Qwen3-32B, approaching the performance of medical doctors and achieving state-of-the-art performance on the MEDEC benchmark dataset. Code available on GitHub: https://github.com/CraigMyles/clinical-note-error-detection