Reproducibility and Robustness of Large Language Models for Mobility Functional Status Extraction.

Clinical narrative text contains crucial patient information, yet reliable extraction remains challenging due to linguistic variability, documentation habits, and differences across care settings. Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong accuracy on clinical information extraction (IE), but their reproducibility (stability under repeated runs) and robustness (stability under small, natural prompt variations) are less consistently quantified, despite being central to clinical deployment. In this study, we evaluate three open-weight LLMs representing distinct modeling choices: a dense general-purpose model (Llama 3.3), a mixture-of-experts (MoE) general-purpose model (Llama 4), and a domain-tuned medical model (MedGemma). We focus on binary clinical IE aligned with four mobility classes from the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) framework. Using a controlled experimental design, we quantify (1) intra-prompt reproducibility across repeated sampling and (2) inter-prompt robustness across paraphrased prompts. We jointly report predictive performance (F1-score) and stability (Fleiss' Kappa). And we test factor effects using three-way ANOVA with post-hoc comparisons. Results show that increasing temperature generally degrades agreement, but the magnitude depends on model and task; furthermore, prompt paraphrasing can substantially reduce stability, with particularly large drops for the MoE model. Finally, we evaluate a practical mitigation, self-consistency via majority voting, which improves κ substantially and often improves or preserves F1-score, at the cost of additional inference. Together, these findings provide a reproducible framework and concrete recommendations for evaluating and improving LLM reliability in clinical IE.