Overview of the ArchEHR-QA 2026 Shared Task on Grounded Question Answering from Electronic Health Records

Sarvesh Soni, Dina Demner-Fushman


Abstract
We present an overview of the ArchEHR-QA 2026 Shared Task on grounded question answering from electronic health records (EHRs), organized at the CL4Health Workshop at LREC 2026. The 2026 task decomposes grounded EHR question answering (QA) into four complementary subtasks: question interpretation, evidence identification, answer generation, and evidence alignment. We evaluated submitted systems for the text-generation subtasks (question interpretation and answer generation) using lexical, semantic, and grounding-sensitive automatic metrics, and for the evidence-centric subtasks (evidence identification and evidence alignment) using precision, recall, and F1. The shared task received 198 submitted runs from 43 teams, and 17 teams additionally provided system descriptions for this overview. The highest-ranked systems differed across subtasks, and gains over the organizer baseline were largest on the evidence-centric subtasks. Across submitted system descriptions, prompt-based large language model (LLM) pipelines were dominant, whereas task-specific fine-tuning was rare; retrieval, self-consistency, and ensembling were especially common in the strongest evidence-centric systems. In this paper, we describe the task design, data, evaluation protocol, baselines, participation, official results, and common system characteristics, and discuss implications for developing clinically faithful and transparent QA systems.
Anthology ID:
2026.cl4health-1.23
Volume:
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Patient-Oriented Language Processing (CL4Health) @ LREC 2026
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Editors:
Deepak Gupta, Paul Thompson, Sophia Ananiadou, Dina Demner-Fushman
Venues:
CL4Health | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
255–267
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-cl4health-23
DOI:
10.63317/3nmxw7vuu7mn
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sarvesh Soni and Dina Demner-Fushman. 2026. Overview of the ArchEHR-QA 2026 Shared Task on Grounded Question Answering from Electronic Health Records. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Patient-Oriented Language Processing (CL4Health) @ LREC 2026, pages 255–267, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Overview of the ArchEHR-QA 2026 Shared Task on Grounded Question Answering from Electronic Health Records (Soni & Demner-Fushman, CL4Health 2026)
Copy Citation: