HealthCraft: A Reinforcement Learning Safety Environment for Emergency Medicine
On the map: Deep reinforcement learning methods → Safe and constrained RL
Abstract (arXiv)
Frontier language models are being deployed into clinical workflows faster than the infrastructure to evaluate them safely. Static medical-QA benchmarks miss the failure modes that matter in emergency medicine: trajectory-level safety collapse, tool misuse, and capitulation under sustained clinical pressure. We present HealthCraft, the first public reinforcement-learning environment that rewards trajectory-level safety under realistic emergency-medicine conditions, adapted from Corecraft. It is built on a FHIR R4 world state with 14 entity types and 3,987 seed entities, exposes 24 MCP tools, and defines a dual-layer rubric that zeroes reward whenever any safety-critical criterion is violated. We release 195 tasks across six categories, graded against 2,255 binary criteria (515 safety-critical); a post-hoc 10-task negative-class slate extends this to 205 tasks and 2,337 criteria. V8 results on two frontier models show Claude Opus 4.6 at Pass@1 24.8% [21.5-28.4] and GPT-5.4 at 12.6% [10.2-15.6], with safety-failure rates of 27.5% and 34.0%. On multi-step workflows - the closest proxy to real emergency care - performance collapses to near zero (Claude 1.0%, GPT-5.4 0.0%) despite partial competence on individual steps. Six infrastructure bugs fixed between pilots v2 and v8 re-ordered which model "looks stronger," evidence that infrastructure fidelity is part of the measurement. A deterministic LLM-judge overlay bounds evaluator noise, and a 60-run negative-class smoke pilot shows the reward signal is not drop-in training-safe: restraint criteria pass at 0.929 prevalence, a gameability an eval harness can tolerate but a training reward cannot. We scaffold coupling to a Megatron+SGLang+GRPO loop per Corecraft Section 5.2 and leave training-reward ablations as future work. Environment, tasks, rubrics, and harness are released under Apache 2.0.
Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Safe and constrained RL, one of 15 directions in Deep reinforcement learning methods. Builds on 4 of its 7 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 18 Apr 2026.
Builds on
4 of 7 references.
References · 4
- 2016Concrete Problems in AI Safetycited by 1,642
- 2020What Disease does this Patient Have? A Large-scale Open Domain Question Answering Dataset from Medical Examscited by 1,356
- 2025HealthBench: Evaluating Large Language Models Towards Improved Human Healthcited by 429
- 2026EnterpriseBench Corecraft: Training Generalizable Agents on High-Fidelity RL Environmentscited by 8
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.
1 paper.
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
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- 2025SafeWork-R1: Coevolving Safety and Intelligence under the AI-45circ Law
- 2026MAPLE: Elevating Medical Reasoning from Statistical Consensus to Process-Led Alignment
- 2026Safety Generalization Under Distribution Shift in Safe Reinforcement Learning: A Diabetes Testbed
- 2024Revisiting Safe Exploration in Safe Reinforcement learning