# MedHarnessBench: A Unified Benchmark for Healthcare Agent Evaluation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15714 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.15714/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11366/) (2023)
- [Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16291/) (2023)
- [SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15793/) (2024)
- [ExpeL: LLM Agents Are Experiential Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10144/) (2023)
- [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)
- [MedAgentBench: A Realistic Virtual EHR Environment to Benchmark Medical LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.14654/) (2025)
- [Natural-Language Agent Harnesses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25723/) (2026)
- [Harness-Bench: Measuring Harness Effects across Models in Realistic Agent Workflows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27922/) (2026)
- [PhysicianBench: Evaluating LLM Agents in Real-World EHR Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02240/) (2026)
- [HealthAdminBench: Evaluating Computer-Use Agents on Healthcare Administration Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.09937/) (2026)
- [Auditing Agent Harness Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14271/) (2026)
- [CHI-Bench: Can AI Agents Automate End-to-End, Long-Horizon, Policy-Rich Healthcare Workflows?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.16679/) (2026)
- [HealthAgentBench: A Unified Benchmark Suite of Realistic Agentic Healthcare Environments for Challenging Frontier AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31179/) (2026)
- [MedCTA: A Benchmark for Clinical Tool Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.11702/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Healthcare agents must transform longitudinal clinical evidence into reliable actions through heterogeneous tools and stateful workflows, conditions under which model-centric systems may lose context, misuse tools, fail to verify consequential transitions, or cross authorization boundaries. Existing medical-agent benchmarks primarily emphasize terminal task outcomes, making it difficult to determine whether execution failures arise from the agent model, the runtime harness, or their interaction. We present the Medical Harness Protocol, an outcome-preserving framework that independently evaluates seven healthcare-specific process dimensions: Care Action Fulfillment, Clinical Resource Competence, Patient-Evidence Alignment, Clinical Workflow Continuity, Clinical Auditability, Closed-Loop Verification, and Clinical Conduct Boundaries. A normalized intervention trace further tracks whether runtime support is available, activated, delivered, adopted by the agent, and propagated into subsequent behavior. We instantiate the protocol as MedHarnessBench, comprising 342 executable tasks across FHIR/EHR operations, healthcare-administration interfaces, and multimodal clinical tools. Across more than 16,000 controlled task executions, MedHarness yields broad improvements in terminal task success, intermediate subtask completion, and healthcare-specific process quality. We further evaluate MedHarness against multiple general-purpose harnesses and use controlled single-fault perturbations to verify the sensitivity and discrimination of the seven-dimensional evaluation. These results demonstrate that healthcare-specific runtime support can substantially improve both task completion and execution quality, while revealing failures that terminal outcomes alone cannot capture. Code and resources are available at https://github.com/Tomry1114/Awesome-Agent-Harness-for-Healthcare.