# DeCode: Decoupling Content and Delivery for Medical QA

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02123 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02123/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 17 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [What Disease does this Patient Have? A Large-scale Open Domain Question Answering Dataset from Medical Exams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13081/) (2020)
- [PubMedQA: A Dataset for Biomedical Research Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06146/) (2019)
- [HealthBench: Evaluating Large Language Models Towards Improved Human Health](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08775/) (2025)
- [Can Generalist Foundation Models Outcompete Special-Purpose Tuning? Case Study in Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16452/) (2023)
- [MedAgents: Large Language Models as Collaborators for Zero-shot Medical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10537/) (2023)
- [Agent Hospital: A Simulacrum of Hospital with Evolvable Medical Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02957/) (2024)
- [AI Hospital: Benchmarking Large Language Models in a Multi-agent Medical Interaction Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09742/) (2024)
- [AutoMedPrompt: A New Framework for Optimizing LLM Medical Prompts Using Textual Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15944/) (2025)
- [Enhancing the Medical Context-Awareness Ability of LLMs via Multifaceted Self-Refinement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10067/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong medical knowledge and can generate factually accurate responses. However, existing models often fail to account for individual patient contexts, producing answers that are clinically correct yet poorly aligned with patients' needs. In this work, we introduce DeCode (Decoupling Content and Delivery), a training-free, model-agnostic framework that adapts existing LLMs to produce contextualized answers in clinical settings. We evaluate DeCode on OpenAI HealthBench, a comprehensive and challenging benchmark designed to assess clinical relevance and validity of LLM responses. DeCode boosts zero-shot performance from 28.4% to 49.8% and achieves new state-of-the-art compared to existing methods. Experimental results suggest the effectiveness of DeCode in improving clinical question answering of LLMs.