Gowsikkan Sikkan Sudhagar


2025

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EXL Health AI Lab at MEDIQA-OE 2025: Evaluating Prompting Strategies with MedGemma for Medical Order Extraction
Abhinand Balachandran | Bavana Durgapraveen | Gowsikkan Sikkan Sudhagar | Vidhya Varshany J S | Sriram Rajkumar
Proceedings of the 7th Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop

The accurate extraction of medical orders fromdoctor-patient conversations is a critical taskfor reducing clinical documentation burdensand ensuring patient safety. This paper detailsour team’s submission to the MEDIQA-OE-2025Shared Task. We investigate the performanceof MedGemma, a new domain-specific opensource language model, for structured order extraction. We systematically evaluate three distinct prompting paradigms: a straightforwardone-shot approach, a reasoning-focused ReActframework, and a multi-step agentic workflow.Our experiments reveal that while more complex frameworks like ReAct and agentic flowsare powerful, the simpler one-shot promptingmethod achieved the highest performance onthe official validation set. We posit that on manually annotated transcripts, complex reasoningchains can lead to “overthinking” and introduce noise, making a direct approach more robust and efficient. Our work provides valuableinsights into selecting appropriate promptingstrategies for clinical information extraction invaried data conditions.