Generative Foundation Model for Structured and Unstructured Electronic Health Records

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Main Authors: Sivarajkumar, Sonish, Zhang, Hang, Ji, Yuelyu, Bilalpur, Maneesh, Wu, Xizhi, Li, Chenyu, Kwak, Min Gu, Visweswaran, Shyam, Wang, Yanshan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Sivarajkumar, Sonish
Zhang, Hang
Ji, Yuelyu
Bilalpur, Maneesh
Wu, Xizhi
Li, Chenyu
Kwak, Min Gu
Visweswaran, Shyam
Wang, Yanshan
author_facet Sivarajkumar, Sonish
Zhang, Hang
Ji, Yuelyu
Bilalpur, Maneesh
Wu, Xizhi
Li, Chenyu
Kwak, Min Gu
Visweswaran, Shyam
Wang, Yanshan
contents Electronic health records (EHRs) are rich clinical data sources but complex repositories of patient data, spanning structured elements (demographics, vitals, lab results, codes), unstructured clinical notes and other modalities of data. Harnessing this heterogeneity is critical for improving patient outcomes. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled foundation models that can learn from multiple data modalities and support clinical tasks. However, most current approaches simply serialize numeric EHR data into text, which risks losing temporal and quantitative detail. We introduce Generative Deep Patient (GDP), a multimodal foundation model that natively encodes structured EHR time-series via a CNN-Transformer encoder and fuses it with unstructured EHRs through cross-modal attention into a LLaMA-based decoder. GDP is trained in two stages: (1) generative pretraining, where it learns to produce clinical narratives from raw patient timelines while also performing masked feature prediction (MFP) and next time-step prediction (NTP) to capture temporal dynamics; and (2) multi-task fine-tuning for clinically meaningful predictions (e.g., heart failure, type 2 diabetes, 30-day readmission). In clinical prediction, GDP demonstrated superior performance on MIMIC-IV: heart failure AUROC = 0.923, type 2 diabetes AUROC = 0.817, and 30-day readmission AUROC = 0.627. For narrative generation, GDP achieved ROUGE-L = 0.135 and BERTScore-F1 = 0.545. In a blinded human evaluation, GDP-Instruct scored highest on faithfulness, fluency, and overall clinical utility, suggesting reduced hospital documentation workload without sacrificing accuracy. Our results demonstrate that a single multimodal foundation model can both predict clinically actionable events and generate high-quality clinical narratives. Furthermore, GDP's flexible architecture can be extended to additional modalities.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_16054
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Generative Foundation Model for Structured and Unstructured Electronic Health Records
Sivarajkumar, Sonish
Zhang, Hang
Ji, Yuelyu
Bilalpur, Maneesh
Wu, Xizhi
Li, Chenyu
Kwak, Min Gu
Visweswaran, Shyam
Wang, Yanshan
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Electronic health records (EHRs) are rich clinical data sources but complex repositories of patient data, spanning structured elements (demographics, vitals, lab results, codes), unstructured clinical notes and other modalities of data. Harnessing this heterogeneity is critical for improving patient outcomes. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled foundation models that can learn from multiple data modalities and support clinical tasks. However, most current approaches simply serialize numeric EHR data into text, which risks losing temporal and quantitative detail. We introduce Generative Deep Patient (GDP), a multimodal foundation model that natively encodes structured EHR time-series via a CNN-Transformer encoder and fuses it with unstructured EHRs through cross-modal attention into a LLaMA-based decoder. GDP is trained in two stages: (1) generative pretraining, where it learns to produce clinical narratives from raw patient timelines while also performing masked feature prediction (MFP) and next time-step prediction (NTP) to capture temporal dynamics; and (2) multi-task fine-tuning for clinically meaningful predictions (e.g., heart failure, type 2 diabetes, 30-day readmission). In clinical prediction, GDP demonstrated superior performance on MIMIC-IV: heart failure AUROC = 0.923, type 2 diabetes AUROC = 0.817, and 30-day readmission AUROC = 0.627. For narrative generation, GDP achieved ROUGE-L = 0.135 and BERTScore-F1 = 0.545. In a blinded human evaluation, GDP-Instruct scored highest on faithfulness, fluency, and overall clinical utility, suggesting reduced hospital documentation workload without sacrificing accuracy. Our results demonstrate that a single multimodal foundation model can both predict clinically actionable events and generate high-quality clinical narratives. Furthermore, GDP's flexible architecture can be extended to additional modalities.
title Generative Foundation Model for Structured and Unstructured Electronic Health Records
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16054