Serialized EHR make for good text representations
Not on the map. Why?
Abstract (arXiv)
The emergence of foundation models in healthcare has opened new avenues for learning generalizable representations from large scale clinical data. Yet, existing approaches often struggle to reconcile the tabular and event based nature of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) with the sequential priors of natural language models. This structural mismatch limits their ability to capture longitudinal dependencies across patient encounters. We introduce SerialBEHRT, a domain aligned foundation model that extends SciBERT through additional pretraining on structured EHR sequences. SerialBEHRT is designed to encode temporal and contextual relationships among clinical events, thereby producing richer patient representations. We evaluate its effectiveness on the task of antibiotic susceptibility prediction, a clinically meaningful problem in antibiotic stewardship. Through extensive benchmarking against state of the art EHR representation strategies, we demonstrate that SerialBEHRT achieves superior and more consistent performance, highlighting the importance of temporal serialization in foundation model pretraining for healthcare.
Key facts. Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 43 of its 73 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 11 Oct 2025.
Builds on
43 of 73 references.
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 7.
7 papers.
- 2026Learning Clinical Representations Under Systematic Distribution Shiftcited by 2
- 2026Discriminative Representation Learning for Clinical Predictioncited by 2
- 2026Learning Longitudinal Health Representations from EHR and Wearable Datacited by 1
- 2026Uncertainty-Aware Foundation Models for Clinical Datacited by 1
- 2026Event Fields: Learning Latent Event Structure for Waveform Foundation Modelscited by 0
- 2026WISTERIA: Learning Clinical Representations from Noisy Supervision via Multi-View Consistency in Electronic Health Recordscited by 0
- 2026AURORA: Contextual Orthogonalization for Geometric Representation Learning in Healthcare Foundation Modelscited by 0
- 2026AURORA: Contextual Orthogonalization for Geometric Representation Learning in Healthcare Foundation Models18 May 2026
- 2026WISTERIA: Learning Clinical Representations from Noisy Supervision via Multi-View Consistency in Electronic Health Records10 May 2026
- 2026Event Fields: Learning Latent Event Structure for Waveform Foundation Models9 May 2026
- 2026Uncertainty-Aware Foundation Models for Clinical Data5 Apr 2026
- 2026Discriminative Representation Learning for Clinical Prediction21 Mar 2026
- 2026Learning Clinical Representations Under Systematic Distribution Shift7 Mar 2026
- 2026Learning Longitudinal Health Representations from EHR and Wearable Data18 Jan 2026