Three small models for healthcare intake — and what shipping all three taught me

Two months ago I started a portfolio project: build three small specialized language models for healthcare practice intake, benchmark each one honestly against frontier APIs, and write about what I learned. The goal was to build the case that small specialized models still have a place in the 2026 toolkit alongside frontier LLMs - not as replacements, but as the first stage of a hybrid pipeline. This is the post about the third model. It's also the post about the suite - what worked across all three, what didn't, and the pattern that emerged.