# TeamMedAgents: Pareto-Efficient Multi-Agent Medical Reasoning Through Teamwork Theory

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08115 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08115/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Clinical and biomedical applications, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 21 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Aug 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Clinical and biomedical applications](https://mlsanity.com/lr/clinical-and-biomedical-applications/)
- LLM agents and tool use / [Medical and scientific domain agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/medical-and-scientific-domain-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Scaling LLM Test-Time Compute Optimally can be More Effective than Scaling Model Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03314/) (2024)
- [MMLU-Pro: A More Robust and Challenging Multi-Task Language Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01574/) (2024)
- [Gemma 3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19786/) (2025)
- [CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Society](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17760/) (2023)
- [What Disease does this Patient Have? A Large-scale Open Domain Question Answering Dataset from Medical Exams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13081/) (2020)
- [FrugalGPT: How to Use Large Language Models While Reducing Cost and Improving Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05176/) (2023)
- [PathVQA: 30000+ Questions for Medical Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10286/) (2020)
- [Multi-Agent Collaboration Mechanisms: A Survey of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06322/) (2025)
- [PMC-VQA: Visual Instruction Tuning for Medical Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10415/) (2023)
- [ReConcile: Round-Table Conference Improves Reasoning via Consensus among Diverse LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13007/) (2023)
- [A Dynamic LLM-Powered Agent Network for Task-Oriented Agent Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02170/) (2023)
- [Inference Scaling Laws: An Empirical Analysis of Compute-Optimal Inference for Problem-Solving with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00724/) (2024)
- [MDAgents: An Adaptive Collaboration of LLMs for Medical Decision-Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15155/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking Large Language Models on Answering and Explaining Challenging Medical Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18060/) (2024)
- [LLM-Coordination: Evaluating and Analyzing Multi-agent Coordination Abilities in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03903/) (2023)
- [Inference-Time Scaling for Complex Tasks: Where We Stand and What Lies Ahead](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00294/) (2025)
- [MMedAgent-RL: Optimizing Multi-Agent Collaboration for Multimodal Medical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00555/) (2025)
- [Cost-of-Pass: An Economic Framework for Evaluating Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13359/) (2025)
- [Small Language Models Learn Enhanced Reasoning Skills from Medical Textbooks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00376/) (2024)
- [MedChat: A Multi-Agent Framework for Multimodal Diagnosis with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07400/) (2025)
- [Small Language Models (SLMs) Can Still Pack a Punch: A survey (updated 2026)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05465/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [The Consistency Illusion: How Multi-Agent Debate Hides Reasoning Misalignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08457/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Complex medical reasoning has historically required frontier language models to achieve clinically-acceptable accuracy, creating computational barriers that limit deployment in resource-constrained clinical settings. We present TeamMedAgents, a modular multi-agent framework that translates Salas et al.'s evidence-based teamwork theory into computational mechanisms--shared mental models, team leadership, team orientation, trust networks, and mutual monitoring--enabling Small Language Models to perform multi-step clinical reasoning efficiently. Evaluation across 8 medical benchmarks demonstrates that TeamMedAgents advances the Pareto efficiency frontier by 1-2 orders of magnitude, achieving competitive accuracy at substantially lower token cost than MDAgents, MedAgents, DyLAN, and ReConcile. The framework exhibits the lowest cross-dataset variance among multi-agent approaches, enabling deployment without per-task tuning. Our results establish that theory-grounded coordination mechanisms provide essential scaffolding for deploying efficient medical AI in resource-constrained clinical environments.