Research

Paper

AI LLM February 26, 2026

Toward Automatic Filling of Case Report Forms: A Case Study on Data from an Italian Emergency Department

Authors

Gabriela Anna Kaczmarek, Pietro Ferrazzi, Lorenzo Porta, Vicky Rubini, Bernardo Magnini

Abstract

Case Report Forms (CRFs) collect data about patients and are at the core of well-established practices to conduct research in clinical settings. With the recent progress of language technologies, there is an increasing interest in automatic CRF-filling from clinical notes, mostly based on the use of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, there is a general scarcity of annotated CRF data, both for training and testing LLMs, which limits the progress on this task. As a step in the direction of providing such data, we present a new dataset of clinical notes from an Italian Emergency Department annotated with respect to a pre-defined CRF containing 134 items to be filled. We provide an analysis of the data, define the CRF-filling task and metric for its evaluation, and report on pilot experiments where we use an open-source state-of-the-art LLM to automatically execute the task. Results of the case-study show that (i) CRF-filling from real clinical notes in Italian can be approached in a zero-shot setting; (ii) LLMs' results are affected by biases (e.g., a cautious behaviour favours "unknown" answers), which need to be corrected.

Metadata

arXiv ID: 2602.23062
Provider: ARXIV
Primary Category: cs.CL
Published: 2026-02-26
Fetched: 2026-02-27 04:35

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