Automating Clinical Information Retrieval from Finnish Electronic Health Records Using Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Saukkoriipi, Mikko, Hernandez, Nicole, Sahlsten, Jaakko, Kaski, Kimmo, Arponen, Otso
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Saukkoriipi, Mikko
Hernandez, Nicole
Sahlsten, Jaakko
Kaski, Kimmo
Arponen, Otso
author_facet Saukkoriipi, Mikko
Hernandez, Nicole
Sahlsten, Jaakko
Kaski, Kimmo
Arponen, Otso
contents Clinicians often need to retrieve patient-specific information from electronic health records (EHRs), a task that is time-consuming and error-prone. We present a locally deployable Clinical Contextual Question Answering (CCQA) framework that answers clinical questions directly from EHRs without external data transfer. Open-source large language models (LLMs) ranging from 4B to 70B parameters were benchmarked under fully offline conditions using 1,664 expert-annotated question-answer pairs derived from records of 183 patients. The dataset consisted predominantly of Finnish clinical text. In free-text generation, Llama-3.1-70B achieved 95.3% accuracy and 97.3% consistency across semantically equivalent question variants, while the smaller Qwen3-30B-A3B-2507 model achieved comparable performance. In a multiple-choice setting, models showed similar accuracy but variable calibration. Low-precision quantization (4-bit and 8-bit) preserved predictive performance while reducing GPU memory requirements and improving deployment feasibility. Clinical evaluation identified clinically significant errors in 2.9% of outputs, and semantically equivalent questions occasionally yielded discordant responses, including instances where one formulation was correct and the other contained a clinically significant error (0.96% of cases). These findings demonstrate that locally hosted open-source LLMs can accurately retrieve patient-specific information from EHRs using natural-language queries, while highlighting the need for validation and human oversight in clinical deployment.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_26434
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Automating Clinical Information Retrieval from Finnish Electronic Health Records Using Large Language Models
Saukkoriipi, Mikko
Hernandez, Nicole
Sahlsten, Jaakko
Kaski, Kimmo
Arponen, Otso
Computation and Language
I.2.7; I.5.4
Clinicians often need to retrieve patient-specific information from electronic health records (EHRs), a task that is time-consuming and error-prone. We present a locally deployable Clinical Contextual Question Answering (CCQA) framework that answers clinical questions directly from EHRs without external data transfer. Open-source large language models (LLMs) ranging from 4B to 70B parameters were benchmarked under fully offline conditions using 1,664 expert-annotated question-answer pairs derived from records of 183 patients. The dataset consisted predominantly of Finnish clinical text. In free-text generation, Llama-3.1-70B achieved 95.3% accuracy and 97.3% consistency across semantically equivalent question variants, while the smaller Qwen3-30B-A3B-2507 model achieved comparable performance. In a multiple-choice setting, models showed similar accuracy but variable calibration. Low-precision quantization (4-bit and 8-bit) preserved predictive performance while reducing GPU memory requirements and improving deployment feasibility. Clinical evaluation identified clinically significant errors in 2.9% of outputs, and semantically equivalent questions occasionally yielded discordant responses, including instances where one formulation was correct and the other contained a clinically significant error (0.96% of cases). These findings demonstrate that locally hosted open-source LLMs can accurately retrieve patient-specific information from EHRs using natural-language queries, while highlighting the need for validation and human oversight in clinical deployment.
title Automating Clinical Information Retrieval from Finnish Electronic Health Records Using Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
I.2.7; I.5.4
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.26434