LLMs Anchor on Chief Complaint and Fail to Integrate Evidence in Sequential Clinical Triage
Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →The study evaluates large language models (LLMs) on sequential emergency department triage, where acuity labels are predicted from progressively longer nurse‑patient conversations. Six LLMs were tested at five checkpoints on simulated and physician‑authored dialogues, showing a decline from moderate‑to‑substantial agreement on full records to only fair‑to‑moderate agreement at each checkpoint. The models consistently anchor on chief complaint exchanges and fail to integrate later evidence, yielding low agreement with clinicians (QWK 0.295 vs. 0.887‑0.929) and concentrating predictions on ESI‑2 and ESI‑3. whyItMatters":"The findings reveal that LLMs, despite strong offline performance, cannot reliably handle the sequential nature of real‑time triage, highlighting a critical gap for safe deployment in emergency settings."
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