# A Comprehensive Survey of Electronic Health Record Modeling: From Deep Learning Approaches to Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12774 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12774/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jul 2025.

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [EHR-R1: A Reasoning-Enhanced Foundational Language Model for Electronic Health Record Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25628/) (2025)
- [One Loss to Rule Them All: Marked Time-to-Event for Structured EHR Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00541/) (2026)
- [Cross-Representation Benchmarking in Time-Series Electronic Health Records for Clinical Outcome Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09159/) (2025)
- [Skin-R1: Clinical Knowledge-Guided Dermatological Diagnosis Using Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14900/) (2025)
- [Beyond CLIP: Knowledge-Enhanced Multimodal Transformers for Cross-Modal Alignment in Diabetic Retinopathy Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.19663/) (2025)
- [EHR-RAGp: Retrieval-Augmented Prototype-Guided Foundation Model for Electronic Health Records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12335/) (2026)
- [Understanding Structured Health Data through Interaction-Aware Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12255/) (2026)
- [ATHENA: Knowledge-guided agentic neural architecture search for AutoFormer-based electronic health record modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.21712/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Artificial intelligence (AI) has demonstrated significant potential in transforming healthcare through the analysis and modeling of electronic health records (EHRs). However, the inherent heterogeneity, temporal irregularity, and domain-specific nature of EHR data present unique challenges that differ fundamentally from those in vision and natural language tasks. This survey offers a comprehensive overview of recent advancements at the intersection of deep learning, large language models (LLMs), and EHR modeling. We introduce a unified taxonomy that spans five key design dimensions: data-centric approaches, neural architecture design, learning-focused strategies, multimodal learning, and LLM-based modeling systems. Within each dimension, we review representative methods addressing data quality enhancement, structural and temporal representation, self-supervised learning, and integration with clinical knowledge. We further highlight emerging trends such as foundation models, LLM-driven clinical agents, and EHR-to-text translation for downstream reasoning. Finally, we discuss open challenges in benchmarking, explainability, clinical alignment, and generalization across diverse clinical settings. This survey aims to provide a structured roadmap for advancing AI-driven EHR modeling and clinical decision support. For a comprehensive list of EHR-related methods, kindly refer to https://survey-on-tabular-data.github.io/.