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First, do NOHARM: towards clinically safe large language models

arXiv:2512.01241v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are routinely used by physicians and patients for medical advice, yet their clinical safety profiles remain poorly characterized. We present NOHARM (Numerous Options Harm Assessment for Risk in Medicine), a benchmark using 100 real primary care-to-specialist consultation cases to measure frequency and severity of harm from LLM-generated medical recommendations. NOHARM covers 10 specialties, with 12,747 expert annotations for 4,249 clinical management options. Across 31 LLMs, potential for severe harm from LLM recommendations occurs in up to 22.2% (95% CI 21.6-22.8%) of cases, with harm of omission accounting for 76.6% (95% CI 76.4-76.8%) of errors. Safety performance is only moderately correlated (r = 0.61-0.64) with existing AI and medical knowledge benchmarks. The best models outperform generalist physicians on safety (mean difference 9.7%, 95% CI 7.0-12.5%), and a diverse multi-agent approach improves safety compared to solo models (mean difference 8.0%, 95% CI 4.0-12.1%). Therefore, despite strong performance on existing evaluations, widely used AI models can produce severely harmful medical advice at nontrivial rates, underscoring clinical safety as a distinct performance dimension necessitating explicit measurement.

Clinician-Directed Large Language Model Software Generation for Therapeutic Interventions in Physical Rehabilitation

arXiv:2511.18274v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Digital health interventions are increasingly used in physical and occupational therapy to deliver home exercise programs via sensor equipped devices such as smartphones, enabling remote monitoring of adherence and performance. However, digital interventions are typically programmed as software before clinical encounters as libraries of parametrized exercise modules targeting broad patient populations. At the point of care, clinicians can only select modules and adjust a narrow set of parameters like repetitions, so patient specific needs that emerge during encounters, such as distinct movement limitations, and home environments, are rarely reflected in the software. We evaluated a digital intervention paradigm that uses large language models (LLMs) to translate clinicians' exercise prescriptions into intervention software. In a prospective single arm feasibility study with 20 licensed physical and occupational therapists and a standardized patient, clinicians created 40 individualized upper extremity programs (398 instructions) that were automatically translated into executable software. Our results show a 45% increase in the proportion of personalized prescriptions that can be implemented as software compared with a template based benchmark, with unanimous consensus among therapists on ease of use. The LLM generated software correctly delivered 99.78% (397/398) of instructions as prescribed and monitored performance with 88.4% (352/398) accuracy, with 90% (18/20) of therapists judged it safe to interact with patients, and 75% (15/20) expressed willingness to adopt it. To our knowledge, this is the first prospective evaluation of clinician directed intervention software generation with LLMs in healthcare, demonstrating feasibility and motivating larger trials to assess clinical effectiveness and safety in real patient populations.
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