# DischargeBench: Pre-Deployment Evaluation of LLM Discharge Educators through Persona-Grounded Patient Simulation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20827 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.20827/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08155/) (2023)
- [QuestEval: Summarization Asks for Fact-based Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12693/) (2021)
- [AgentClinic: a multimodal agent benchmark to evaluate AI in simulated clinical environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07960/) (2024)
- [Roleplay-doh: Enabling Domain-Experts to Create LLM-simulated Patients via Eliciting and Adhering to Principles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00870/) (2024)
- [EHRNoteQA: An LLM Benchmark for Real-World Clinical Practice Using Discharge Summaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16040/) (2024)
- [LLMEval-Med: A Real-world Clinical Benchmark for Medical LLMs with Physician Validation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04078/) (2025)
- [PatientSim: A Persona-Driven Simulator for Realistic Doctor-Patient Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17818/) (2025)
- [Advancing Conversational Diagnostic AI with Multimodal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04653/) (2025)
- [DischargeSim: A Simulation Benchmark for Educational Doctor-Patient Communication at Discharge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07188/) (2025)
- [ChatThero: An LLM-Supported Chatbot for Behavior Change and Therapeutic Support in Addiction Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20996/) (2025)
- [Chatbot To Help Patients Understand Their Health](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05818/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Effective discharge education is personalized: a clinician adapts the discharge plan to each patient's literacy, recall, and personality. Before large language models (LLMs) take on this role with real patients, they need to be evaluated in conversations with diverse patients, yet existing evaluations target static, artifact-generation, or question-answering tasks. We introduce **DischargeBench**, a pre-deployment benchmark in which a candidate LLM educator teaches a persona-grounded simulated patient in an open-ended, multi-turn conversation. We curate **MIMIC-IV-Ext-DischargeBench**, 320 cases across 16 ICD chapters, each paired with a patient persona that varies personality, education level, health literacy, and recall. Each conversation is scored on Conversation Quality, Topic Checklist Score (TCS), Simulated Comprehension Score (SCS), and a Claim-Level Safety Audit (CLSA) by an LLM judge validated against physician annotations. Across eight closed- and open-source LLMs, the best model scored only 0.70 on TCS and 0.72 on SCS, and distrustful and anxious patients lowered comprehension for every model. DischargeBench is intended as a screening step before human evaluation, not as evidence of readiness to educate patients.