Importance of Prompt Optimisation for Error Detection in Medical Notes Using Language Models
Craig Myles, Patrick Schrempf, David Harris-Birtill · Feb 25, 2026 · Citations: 0
How to use this paper page
Coverage: StaleUse this page to decide whether the paper is strong enough to influence an eval design. It summarizes the abstract plus available structured metadata. If the signal is thin, use it as background context and compare it against stronger hub pages before making protocol choices.
Best use
Background context only
Metadata: StaleTrust level
Low
Signals: StaleWhat still needs checking
Extraction flags indicate low-signal or possible false-positive protocol mapping.
Signal confidence: 0.35
Abstract
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