MT-Clinical BERT: Scaling Clinical Information Extraction with Multitask Learning

Clinical notes contain an abundance of important but not-readily accessible information about patients. Systems to automatically extract this information rely on large amounts of training data for which their exists limited resources to create. Furthermore, they are developed dis-jointly; meaning that no information can be shared amongst task-specific systems. This bottle-neck unnecessarily complicates practical application, reduces the performance capabilities of each individual solution and associates the engineering debt of managing multiple information extraction systems. We address these challenges by developing Multitask-Clinical BERT: a single deep learning model that simultaneously performs eight clinical tasks spanning entity extraction, PHI identification, language entailment and similarity by sharing representations amongst tasks. We find our single system performs competitively with all state-the-art task-specific systems while also benefiting from massive computational benefits at inference.