Are We Done with UMLS Injection into Language Models for Medical Question Answering?

Overview & Synopsis

Maybe not. The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) has become an oracle for millions of clinicians and health system developers worldwide. Researchers have increasingly used knowledge graphs derived from UMLS to enhance language models' factual accuracy and reasoning traceability in high-stakes tasks. Medical Question Answering (MQA) is a prime testbed for integration, with benchmarks usually involving professional exercises such as disease diagnosis and drug prescription from patient history. Despite the assumed benefits, empirical evidence shows that UMLS-based graph injection typically yields modest performance gains. This paper reviews existing MQA work, critically analyzing the selected UMLS sources and their usage with language models, and probes each of these choices in isolation. We uncover methodological issues never discussed in prior work, from low UMLS coverage to weak subgraph retrieval pipelines. Based on our findings, we provide actionable recommendations to unlock the untapped potential of UMLS as an external knowledge source.