# HealthAgentBench: A Unified Benchmark Suite of Realistic Agentic Healthcare Environments for Challenging Frontier AI Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.31179 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31179/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Medical and scientific domain agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 15 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jun 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Medical and scientific domain agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/medical-and-scientific-domain-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [What Disease does this Patient Have? A Large-scale Open Domain Question Answering Dataset from Medical Exams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13081/) (2020)
- [Terminal-Bench: Benchmarking Agents on Hard, Realistic Tasks in Command Line Interfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11868/) (2026)
- [HealthBench: Evaluating Large Language Models Towards Improved Human Health](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08775/) (2025)
- [AgentClinic: a multimodal agent benchmark to evaluate AI in simulated clinical environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07960/) (2024)
- [Generalist Foundation Models from a Multimodal Dataset for 3D Computed Tomography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17834/) (2024)
- [EHRSHOT: An EHR Benchmark for Few-Shot Evaluation of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02028/) (2023)
- [AI Hospital: Benchmarking Large Language Models in a Multi-agent Medical Interaction Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09742/) (2024)
- [Sequential Diagnosis with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.22405/) (2025)
- [Towards a clinically accessible radiology foundation model: open-access and lightweight, with automated evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08002/) (2024)
- [Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Simulations for Realistic Clinical Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22678/) (2025)
- [MedAgentGym: A Scalable Agentic Training Environment for Code-Centric Reasoning in Biomedical Data Science](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04405/) (2025)
- [PhysicianBench: Evaluating LLM Agents in Real-World EHR Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02240/) (2026)
- [ReflecTool: Towards Reflection-Aware Tool-Augmented Clinical Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17657/) (2024)
- [HealthAdminBench: Evaluating Computer-Use Agents on Healthcare Administration Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.09937/) (2026)
- [CP-Env: Evaluating Large Language Models on Clinical Pathways in a Controllable Hospital Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10206/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Towards Autonomous and Auditable Medical Imaging Model Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.10522/) (2026)
- [The Path to Self-Evolving Clinical Systems: Scaling Medical Agents from Assistance to Autonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.11175/) (2026)
- [BaT: Towards Self-Evolving Medical Research Agent with Stage Rubrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.16211/) (2026)
- [Cura 1T: Specialized Model for Agentic Healthcare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15314/) (2026)
- [PatientAgentBench: A Benchmark Framework for Evaluating Patient-Facing Health AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.25485/) (2026)
- [A primer on evaluation methods for large language models in healthcare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.14819/) (2026)
- [MedicalHarness: A Controlled Evaluation of LLMs and Agent Harnesses on Medical Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05778/) (2026)
- [MedHarnessBench: A Unified Benchmark for Healthcare Agent Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.15714/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As AI agents become increasingly capable of complex, long-horizon reasoning, rigorous and holistic evaluation is essential for measuring progress toward real-world healthcare applications. We introduce HealthAgentBench, a suite of 54 agentic healthcare tasks across 7 categories each with its unique environment. The benchmark suite spans diverse workflows throughout the patient journey and a broad range of modalities. Each task is designed to replicate an end-to-end clinical workflow: given minimal instructions, an agent must explore raw healthcare data, operate within a complex environment, and execute multi-step solutions that go beyond naive prompting. A final task success rate is reported to provide a single, interpretable metric for HealthAgentBench overall performance for each agent. Evaluating frontier agents on HealthAgentBench, we find that overall task success rate remains low, underscoring the difficulty of the suite. The strongest and the most cost effective agent, Codex GPT-5.5, achieves only approximately 42% success rate. Beyond aggregate performance, HealthAgentBench reveals nuanced strengths and weaknesses across task categories. Frontier agents show promise in automatically developing research modeling pipelines over EHR data, but medical imaging remains especially challenging, particularly for Claude Code models, while Codex GPT-5.5 shows emerging capability. Tasks that combine large search spaces with compositional reasoning requirements remain difficult for all current agents. Together, these results suggest that HealthAgentBench provides a challenging and realistic benchmark with substantial room for future progress. We release our benchmark at https://github.com/microsoft/HealthAgentBench.