DeepSeek-Med-8B: Medical LLM for Chinese Diagnosis and Referral

The uneven distribution of medical resources in China poses significant challenges, especially in rural areas. While large language models (LLMs) offer potential for clinical support, existing systems like GPT-4 and Med-PaLM suffer from hallucinations, English-centric biases, and lack real-time physician integration. We present DeepSeek-Med-8B, a Chinese medical conversational agent based on the DeepSeek-R1-DistillLlama-8B architecture.DeepSeek-Med-8B is trained through: (i) Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on curated Chinese medical corpora; (ii) Reinforcement Learning with AI and Doctor Feedback (RLAIF) for factuality, empathy, and referral quality; and (iii) Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for real-time grounding in physician databases.Across eight clinical tasks, DeepSeek-Med-8B achieves a top1 mean score of 66.9 on GPT-4o-based benchmarks and a 74% top-3 doctor match rate, outperforming rule-based baselines. The model runs efficiently on a single RTX 4090 GPU via INT8 quantization.