Evidence map›Paper›PMID 36882576›Full record

ArticleScientific reports2023

EHR foundation models improve robustness in the presence of temporal distribution shift.

Lin Lawrence Guo, Ethan Steinberg, Scott Lanyon Fleming, Jose Posada, Joshua Lemmon, Stephen R Pfohl, Nigam Shah, Jason Fries, Lillian Sung

Open access · goldAbstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Scientific reports, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 31 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
31citing papers in PubMed, 2 pooled it
7.7field-weighted citation impact, top 2% of its field
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

31 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 44 citations in OpenAlex.

  1. Pooled it
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  9. Knowledgeable Language Models as Black-Box Optimizers for Personalized Medicine.... International Conference on Learning Representations · 2026
    Article
  10. Large Models for Small Tables: Adapting Tabular Foundation Models to EHR Data.AMIA Joint Summits on Translational Science proceedings. AMIA Joint Summits on Translational Science · 2026
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4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

9 authors at 5 institutions in 3 countries.

Lin Lawrence GuoProgram in Child Health Evaluative Sciences, The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Ethan SteinbergStanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA.
Scott Lanyon FlemingStanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA.
Jose PosadaUniversidad del Norte, Barranquilla, Colombia.
Joshua LemmonProgram in Child Health Evaluative Sciences, The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Stephen R PfohlStanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA.
Nigam ShahStanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA.
Jason FriesStanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA.
Lillian SungProgram in Child Health Evaluative Sciences, The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, ON, Canada. Lillian.sung@sickkids.ca.
Stanford University · USHospital for Sick Children · CAInstitute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences · CASickKids Foundation · CAUniversidad del Norte · CO

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Temporal distribution shift negatively impacts the performance of clinical prediction models over time. Pretraining foundation models using self-supervised learning on electronic health records (EHR) may be effective in acquiring informative global patterns that can improve the robustness of task-specific models. The objective was to evaluate the utility of EHR foundation models in improving the in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) performance of clinical prediction models. Transformer- and gated recurrent unit-based foundation models were pretrained on EHR of up to 1.8 M patients (382 M coded events) collected within pre-determined year groups (e.g., 2009-2012) and were subsequently used to construct patient representations for patients admitted to inpatient units. These representations were used to train logistic regression models to predict hospital mortality, long length of stay, 30-day readmission, and ICU admission. We compared our EHR foundation models with baseline logistic regression models learned on count-based representations (count-LR) in ID and OOD year groups. Performance was measured using area-under-the-receiver-operating-characteristic curve (AUROC), area-under-the-precision-recall curve, and absolute calibration error. Both transformer and recurrent-based foundation models generally showed better ID and OOD discrimination relative to count-LR and often exhibited less decay in tasks where there is observable degradation of discrimination performance (average AUROC decay of 3% for transformer-based foundation model vs. 7% for count-LR after 5-9 years). In addition, the performance and robustness of transformer-based foundation models continued to improve as pretraining set size increased. These results suggest that pretraining EHR foundation models at scale is a useful approach for developing clinical prediction models that perform well in the presence of temporal distribution shift.

Indexed as

Electric Power SuppliesElectronic Health RecordsHospitalizationHospital MortalityHumans

Identifiers

PMID36882576
PMCPMC9992466
OpenAlexW4323359744

What OpenQuestion holds

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LicenceCC BY
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Registered trials

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.