sebis at ArchEHR-QA 2026: How Much Can You Do Locally? Evaluating Grounded EHR QA on a Single Notebook

Ibrahim Ebrar Yurt, Fabian Tobias Karl, Tejaswi Choppa, Florian Matthes


Abstract
Clinical question answering over electronic health records (EHRs) can help clinicians and patients access relevant medical information more efficiently. However, many recent approaches rely on large cloud-based models, which are difficult to deploy in clinical environments due to privacy constraints and computational requirements. In this work, we investigate how far grounded EHR question answering can be pushed when restricted to a single notebook. We participate in all four subtasks of the ArchEHR-QA 2026 shared task and evaluate several approaches designed to run on commodity hardware. All experiments are conducted locally without external APIs or cloud infrastructure. Our results show that such systems can achieve competitive performance on the shared task leaderboards. In particular, our submissions perform above average in two subtasks, and we observe that smaller models can approach the performance of much larger systems when properly configured. These findings suggest that privacy-preserving EHR QA systems running fully locally are feasible with current models and commodity hardware. The source code is available at https://github.com/ibrahimey/ArchEHR-QA-2026.
Anthology ID:
2026.cl4health-1.43
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:
469–481
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-cl4health-43
DOI:
10.63317/3mbfiuod7bfc
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ibrahim Ebrar Yurt, Fabian Tobias Karl, Tejaswi Choppa, and Florian Matthes. 2026. sebis at ArchEHR-QA 2026: How Much Can You Do Locally? Evaluating Grounded EHR QA on a Single Notebook. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Patient-Oriented Language Processing (CL4Health) @ LREC 2026, pages 469–481, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
sebis at ArchEHR-QA 2026: How Much Can You Do Locally? Evaluating Grounded EHR QA on a Single Notebook (Yurt et al., CL4Health 2026)
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