Medicine

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

Qianchu Liu, Sheng Zhang, Guanghui Qin

Featured July 13, 2026

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Simply

A new benchmark called HealthAgentBench helps test smart AI agents on 54 realistic healthcare tasks, like fixing X-ray reports or finding tumors, showing that even the best AIs still struggle with complex medical challenges.

In depth

The paper introduces HealthAgentBench, a comprehensive benchmark suite featuring 54 agentic healthcare tasks across 7 diverse categories. This suite provides realistic, interactive environments where AI agents must explore raw data, use tools, and execute multi-step solutions, moving beyond static question-answering to evaluate end-to-end autonomous capabilities in complex clinical workflows. The authors demonstrate that frontier AI agents still achieve low success rates, highlighting significant challenges, especially in medical imaging and tasks requiring large search spaces.

Key Takeaways

1
HealthAgentBench is a novel, unified benchmark with 54 agentic healthcare tasks spanning diverse modalities and clinical workflows, designed to evaluate AI agents' end-to-end autonomous capabilities.
2
The benchmark is challenging and far from saturation, with the strongest frontier agent (Codex GPT-5.5) achieving only a 42% success rate, indicating substantial room for improvement.
3
The evaluation reveals specific bottlenecks for current agents, particularly in medical imaging and tasks requiring complex compositional reasoning over large search spaces.

Conceptual Flow

HIGH LEVEL

Building a Realistic AI Agent Test

The authors created many different healthcare challenges for AI agents, making sure they act like real doctors using various tools and data.

Old AI Tests

Real Patient Data

Clinical Workflows

Design New Challenges

AI Agent Test Suite

AI Agents Still Face Big Hurdles

Even the smartest AI agents only solved a few tasks, especially struggling with medical pictures and finding tiny details in huge datasets.

Smart AI Agents

New AI Test Suite

Evaluate Performance

Low Success Rate

Struggles with Images

Hard to Find Details