LLMs Anchor on Chief Complaint and Fail to Integrate Evidence in Sequential Clinical Triage

Excerpt

arXiv:2609.22904v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Triage in the emergency department (ED) is a sequential decision process that unfolds turn by turn. Existing evaluations of large language models (LLMs) for triage use completed retrospective records and report performance close to that of physicians. We implement a methodology for evaluating LLMs on sequential triage, the task of predicting a triage acuity label from a growing prefix of a nurse-patient conversation. We evaluate six LLMs at five se