EPPCMinerBen: A novel benchmark for evaluating large language models on electronic patient-provider communication via the patient portal.

Effective communication in health care is critical for treatment outcomes and adherence. With patient-provider exchanges shifting to secure messaging, analyzing electronic patient-communication (EPPC) data is both essential and challenging. We introduce EPPCMinerBen, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs in detecting communication patterns and extracting insights from electronic patient-provider messages. EPPCMinerBen includes three sub-tasks: Code Classification, Subcode Classification, and Evidence Extraction. Using 1933 expert-annotated sentences from 752 secure messages of the patient portal at Yale New Haven Hospital, it evaluates LLMs on identifying communicative intent and supporting text. Benchmarks span various LLMs under zero-shot and few-shot settings, with data to be released via the NCI Cancer Data Service. Model performance varied across tasks and settings. Llama-3.1-70B led in evidence extraction (F1: 82.84%) and performed well in classification. Llama-3.3-70b-Instruct outperformed all models in code classification (F1: 67.03%). DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B excelled in subcode classification (F1: 48.25%), while sdoh-llama-3-70B showed consistent performance. Smaller models underperformed, especially in subcode classification (>30% F1). Few-shot prompting improved most tasks. Our results indicate that large, instruction-tuned models tend to achieve higher performance in EPPCMinerBen tasks, particularly evidence extraction while smaller models struggle with fine-grained reasoning. EPPCMinerBen provides a benchmark for discourse-level understanding of patient-provider communication, supporting future work on structured communication analysis and model evaluation.