Enhancing Medication Recommendation with LLM Text Representation
This work addresses the challenge of leveraging unstructured data for medication recommendation, which is an incremental improvement for healthcare AI applications.
The paper tackled the problem of underutilizing unstructured clinical data in medication recommendation by proposing a method that uses Large Language Model (LLM) text representation to extract information from clinical notes, resulting in improved performance when combined with medical codes on two datasets, with LLM text representation alone showing comparable ability to medical code representation alone.
Most of the existing medication recommendation models are predicted with only structured data such as medical codes, with the remaining other large amount of unstructured or semi-structured data underutilization. To increase the utilization effectively, we proposed a method of enhancing medication recommendation with Large Language Model (LLM) text representation. LLM harnesses powerful language understanding and generation capabilities, enabling the extraction of information from complex and lengthy unstructured data such as clinical notes which contain complex terminology. This method can be applied to several existing base models we selected and improve medication recommendation performance with the combination representation of text and medical codes experiments on two different datasets. LLM text representation alone can even demonstrate a comparable ability to the medical code representation alone. Overall, this is a general method that can be applied to other models for improved recommendations.