Benchmark porn is pretty rampant in AI in general and medical AI in particular. It's tough though to benchmark the more clinical side of medicine in particular. But it shouldn't be impossible; we obviously do it all the time for trainees. But a lot of that is multidomain where each informs each other as we assess medical students and residents. AI benchmarks can be very siloed.
• Clinical judgment: Does the model revise its diagnosis as uncertain evidence changes? Does it choose the next useful test?
• Safety and communication: Does it avoid harmful recommendations, critical omissions, overconfidence, and poor patient communication?
• Multimodal reasoning: Can it interpret images and continue a clinically coherent conversation around them?
• EHR and agentic care: Can it retrieve the right record, use tools, remember an evolving course, and complete a multi-step task?
• Broad workflows: Can it handle documentation, research, administration, and clinical decisions across a wider task set?
The evaluation really instead needs to be a stack:
- Benchmark(s) matched to the exact task
- A separate safety and omission test
- Tool-use, longitudinal, or multimodal testing when the workflow requires it
- Local cases, policies, and escalation rules
- Prospective monitoring after deployment
Which part of this stack does an AI tool cover cover and how to safely evaluate should probably be on the mind for any medical AI tool (whether clinical or not)
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