# Synth-SBDH: A Synthetic Dataset of Social and Behavioral Determinants of Health for Clinical Text

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.06056 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06056/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Medical synthetic data and agents, one of 13 directions in Synthetic data and self-improvement for LLMs.
- Builds on 34 of its 97 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jun 2024.

## Placed in

- Synthetic data and self-improvement for LLMs / [Medical synthetic data and agents](https://mlsanity.com/synth/medical-synthetic-data-and-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models Encode Clinical Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13138/) (2022)
- [MetaGPT: Meta Programming for A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00352/) (2023)
- [Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Few-shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15723/) (2020)
- [Distilling Step-by-Step! Outperforming Larger Language Models with Less Training Data and Smaller Model Sizes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02301/) (2023)
- [Capabilities of GPT-4 on Medical Challenge Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13375/) (2023)
- [ToxiGen: A Large-Scale Machine-Generated Dataset for Adversarial and Implicit Hate Speech Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09509/) (2022)
- [Towards Expert-Level Medical Question Answering with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09617/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models are Better Reasoners with Self-Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09561/) (2022)
- [Language Modeling Is Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10668/) (2023)
- [Generating Datasets with Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07540/) (2021)
- [GPT3Mix: Leveraging Large-scale Language Models for Text Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08826/) (2021)
- [InstructUIE: Multi-task Instruction Tuning for Unified Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08085/) (2023)
- [Increasing Diversity While Maintaining Accuracy: Text Data Generation with Large Language Models and Human Interventions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04140/) (2023)
- [Medically Aware GPT-3 as a Data Generator for Medical Dialogue Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07356/) (2021)
- [Prompt-Learning for Fine-Grained Entity Typing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10604/) (2021)
- [Large Language Models to Identify Social Determinants of Health in Electronic Health Records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06354/) (2023)
- [Publicly Shareable Clinical Large Language Model Built on Synthetic Clinical Notes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00237/) (2023)
- [Data Augmentation for Intent Classification with Off-the-shelf Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01959/) (2022)
- [NoteChat: A Dataset of Synthetic Doctor-Patient Conversations Conditioned on Clinical Notes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15959/) (2023)
- [Addressing cognitive bias in medical language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08113/) (2024)
- [Two Directions for Clinical Data Generation with Large Language Models: Data-to-Label and Label-to-Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06774/) (2023)
- [ClinicalMamba: A Generative Clinical Language Model on Longitudinal Clinical Notes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05795/) (2024)
- [The 2022 n2c2/UW Shared Task on Extracting Social Determinants of Health](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05571/) (2023)
- [Social and behavioral determinants of health in the era of artificial intelligence with electronic health records: A scoping review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04216/) (2021)
- [Leveraging Natural Language Processing to Augment Structured Social Determinants of Health Data in the Electronic Health Record](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07538/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Disease Entity Recognition and Normalization is Improved with Large Language Model Derived Synthetic Normalized Mentions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07951/) (2024)
- [Systematic Evaluation of the Quality of Synthetic Clinical Notes Rephrased by LLMs at Million-Note Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17775/) (2026)
- [Clinical Communication Processing with Models Trained on LLM-Generated Synthetic Data: A Structured Survey and Novel Application Case Studies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05993/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Social and behavioral determinants of health (SBDH) play a crucial role in health outcomes and are frequently documented in clinical text. Automatically extracting SBDH information from clinical text relies on publicly available good-quality datasets. However, existing SBDH datasets exhibit substantial limitations in their availability and coverage. In this study, we introduce Synth-SBDH, a novel synthetic dataset with detailed SBDH annotations, encompassing status, temporal information, and rationale across 15 SBDH categories. We showcase the utility of Synth-SBDH on three tasks using real-world clinical datasets from two distinct hospital settings, highlighting its versatility, generalizability, and distillation capabilities. Models trained on Synth-SBDH consistently outperform counterparts with no Synth-SBDH training, achieving up to 63.75% macro-F improvements. Additionally, Synth-SBDH proves effective for rare SBDH categories and under-resource constraints while being substantially cheaper than expert-annotated real-world data. Human evaluation reveals a 71.06% Human-LLM alignment and uncovers areas for future refinements.