Extracting Patient History from Clinical Text: A Comparative Study of Clinical Large Language Models

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Main Authors: Nghiem, Hieu, Le, Tuan-Dung, Chen, Suhao, Thieu, Thanh, Gin, Andrew, Nguyen, Ellie Phuong, Delen, Dursun, Thomas, Johnson, Lamichhane, Jivan, Miao, Zhuqi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Nghiem, Hieu
Le, Tuan-Dung
Chen, Suhao
Thieu, Thanh
Gin, Andrew
Nguyen, Ellie Phuong
Delen, Dursun
Thomas, Johnson
Lamichhane, Jivan
Miao, Zhuqi
author_facet Nghiem, Hieu
Le, Tuan-Dung
Chen, Suhao
Thieu, Thanh
Gin, Andrew
Nguyen, Ellie Phuong
Delen, Dursun
Thomas, Johnson
Lamichhane, Jivan
Miao, Zhuqi
contents Extracting medical history entities (MHEs) related to a patient's chief complaint (CC), history of present illness (HPI), and past, family, and social history (PFSH) helps structure free-text clinical notes into standardized EHRs, streamlining downstream tasks like continuity of care, medical coding, and quality metrics. Fine-tuned clinical large language models (cLLMs) can assist in this process while ensuring the protection of sensitive data via on-premises deployment. This study evaluates the performance of cLLMs in recognizing CC/HPI/PFSH-related MHEs and examines how note characteristics impact model accuracy. We annotated 1,449 MHEs across 61 outpatient-related clinical notes from the MTSamples repository. To recognize these entities, we fine-tuned seven state-of-the-art cLLMs. Additionally, we assessed the models' performance when enhanced by integrating, problems, tests, treatments, and other basic medical entities (BMEs). We compared the performance of these models against GPT-4o in a zero-shot setting. To further understand the textual characteristics affecting model accuracy, we conducted an error analysis focused on note length, entity length, and segmentation. The cLLMs showed potential in reducing the time required for extracting MHEs by over 20%. However, detecting many types of MHEs remained challenging due to their polysemous nature and the frequent involvement of non-medical vocabulary. Fine-tuned GatorTron and GatorTronS, two of the most extensively trained cLLMs, demonstrated the highest performance. Integrating pre-identified BME information improved model performance for certain entities. Regarding the impact of textual characteristics on model performance, we found that longer entities were harder to identify, note length did not correlate with a higher error rate, and well-organized segments with headings are beneficial for the extraction.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_23281
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Extracting Patient History from Clinical Text: A Comparative Study of Clinical Large Language Models
Nghiem, Hieu
Le, Tuan-Dung
Chen, Suhao
Thieu, Thanh
Gin, Andrew
Nguyen, Ellie Phuong
Delen, Dursun
Thomas, Johnson
Lamichhane, Jivan
Miao, Zhuqi
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Extracting medical history entities (MHEs) related to a patient's chief complaint (CC), history of present illness (HPI), and past, family, and social history (PFSH) helps structure free-text clinical notes into standardized EHRs, streamlining downstream tasks like continuity of care, medical coding, and quality metrics. Fine-tuned clinical large language models (cLLMs) can assist in this process while ensuring the protection of sensitive data via on-premises deployment. This study evaluates the performance of cLLMs in recognizing CC/HPI/PFSH-related MHEs and examines how note characteristics impact model accuracy. We annotated 1,449 MHEs across 61 outpatient-related clinical notes from the MTSamples repository. To recognize these entities, we fine-tuned seven state-of-the-art cLLMs. Additionally, we assessed the models' performance when enhanced by integrating, problems, tests, treatments, and other basic medical entities (BMEs). We compared the performance of these models against GPT-4o in a zero-shot setting. To further understand the textual characteristics affecting model accuracy, we conducted an error analysis focused on note length, entity length, and segmentation. The cLLMs showed potential in reducing the time required for extracting MHEs by over 20%. However, detecting many types of MHEs remained challenging due to their polysemous nature and the frequent involvement of non-medical vocabulary. Fine-tuned GatorTron and GatorTronS, two of the most extensively trained cLLMs, demonstrated the highest performance. Integrating pre-identified BME information improved model performance for certain entities. Regarding the impact of textual characteristics on model performance, we found that longer entities were harder to identify, note length did not correlate with a higher error rate, and well-organized segments with headings are beneficial for the extraction.
title Extracting Patient History from Clinical Text: A Comparative Study of Clinical Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23281