Improving Social Determinants of Health Documentation in French EHRs Using Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Bazoge, Adrien, Beaufils, Pacôme Constant dit, Hmitouch, Mohammed, Bourcier, Romain, Morin, Emmanuel, Dufour, Richard, Daille, Béatrice, Gourraud, Pierre-Antoine, Karakachoff, Matilde
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866908434286247936
author Bazoge, Adrien
Beaufils, Pacôme Constant dit
Hmitouch, Mohammed
Bourcier, Romain
Morin, Emmanuel
Dufour, Richard
Daille, Béatrice
Gourraud, Pierre-Antoine
Karakachoff, Matilde
author_facet Bazoge, Adrien
Beaufils, Pacôme Constant dit
Hmitouch, Mohammed
Bourcier, Romain
Morin, Emmanuel
Dufour, Richard
Daille, Béatrice
Gourraud, Pierre-Antoine
Karakachoff, Matilde
contents Social determinants of health (SDoH) significantly influence health outcomes, shaping disease progression, treatment adherence, and health disparities. However, their documentation in structured electronic health records (EHRs) is often incomplete or missing. This study presents an approach based on large language models (LLMs) for extracting 13 SDoH categories from French clinical notes. We trained Flan-T5-Large on annotated social history sections from clinical notes at Nantes University Hospital, France. We evaluated the model at two levels: (i) identification of SDoH categories and associated values, and (ii) extraction of detailed SDoH with associated temporal and quantitative information. The model performance was assessed across four datasets, including two that we publicly release as open resources. The model achieved strong performance for identifying well-documented categories such as living condition, marital status, descendants, job, tobacco, and alcohol use (F1 score > 0.80). Performance was lower for categories with limited training data or highly variable expressions, such as employment status, housing, physical activity, income, and education. Our model identified 95.8% of patients with at least one SDoH, compared to 2.8% for ICD-10 codes from structured EHR data. Our error analysis showed that performance limitations were linked to annotation inconsistencies, reliance on English-centric tokenizer, and reduced generalizability due to the model being trained on social history sections only. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of NLP in improving the completeness of real-world SDoH data in a non-English EHR system.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_03433
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Improving Social Determinants of Health Documentation in French EHRs Using Large Language Models
Bazoge, Adrien
Beaufils, Pacôme Constant dit
Hmitouch, Mohammed
Bourcier, Romain
Morin, Emmanuel
Dufour, Richard
Daille, Béatrice
Gourraud, Pierre-Antoine
Karakachoff, Matilde
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Social determinants of health (SDoH) significantly influence health outcomes, shaping disease progression, treatment adherence, and health disparities. However, their documentation in structured electronic health records (EHRs) is often incomplete or missing. This study presents an approach based on large language models (LLMs) for extracting 13 SDoH categories from French clinical notes. We trained Flan-T5-Large on annotated social history sections from clinical notes at Nantes University Hospital, France. We evaluated the model at two levels: (i) identification of SDoH categories and associated values, and (ii) extraction of detailed SDoH with associated temporal and quantitative information. The model performance was assessed across four datasets, including two that we publicly release as open resources. The model achieved strong performance for identifying well-documented categories such as living condition, marital status, descendants, job, tobacco, and alcohol use (F1 score > 0.80). Performance was lower for categories with limited training data or highly variable expressions, such as employment status, housing, physical activity, income, and education. Our model identified 95.8% of patients with at least one SDoH, compared to 2.8% for ICD-10 codes from structured EHR data. Our error analysis showed that performance limitations were linked to annotation inconsistencies, reliance on English-centric tokenizer, and reduced generalizability due to the model being trained on social history sections only. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of NLP in improving the completeness of real-world SDoH data in a non-English EHR system.
title Improving Social Determinants of Health Documentation in French EHRs Using Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.03433