# Foundation Models to Unlock Real-World Evidence from Nationwide Medical Claims

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.02740 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02740/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Med-BERT: pre-trained contextualized embeddings on large-scale structured electronic health records for disease prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12833/) (2020)
- [BEHRT: Transformer for Electronic Health Records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09538/) (2019)
- [EHRSHOT: An EHR Benchmark for Few-Shot Evaluation of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02028/) (2023)
- [Language Models Are An Effective Patient Representation Learning Technique For Electronic Health Record Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.05295/) (2020)
- [MOTOR: A Time-To-Event Foundation Model For Structured Medical Records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03150/) (2023)
- [Zero Shot Health Trajectory Prediction Using Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21124/) (2024)
- [Event Stream GPT: A Data Pre-processing and Modeling Library for Generative, Pre-trained Transformers over Continuous-time Sequences of Complex Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11547/) (2023)
- [Generative Medical Event Models Improve with Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12104/) (2025)
- [CEHR-GPT: Generating Electronic Health Records with Chronological Patient Timelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04400/) (2024)
- [Exploring Scaling Laws for EHR Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22964/) (2025)
- [FoMoH: A clinically meaningful foundation model evaluation for structured electronic health records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16941/) (2025)
- [Introducing the Large Medical Model: State of the art healthcare cost and risk prediction with transformers trained on patient event sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13000/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [TEDDY: A Pediatric Foundation Model for Risk Forewarning from ICD-Coded Diagnostic Histories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.14191/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Evidence derived from large-scale real-world data (RWD) is increasingly informing regulatory evaluation and healthcare decision-making. Administrative claims provide population-scale, longitudinal records of healthcare utilization, expenditure, and detailed coding of diagnoses, procedures, and medications, yet their potential as a substrate for healthcare foundation models remains largely unexplored. Here we present ReClaim, a generative transformer trained from scratch on 43.8 billion medical events from more than 200 million enrollees in the MarketScan claims data spanning 2008-2022. ReClaim models longitudinal trajectories across diagnoses, procedures, medications, and expenditure, and was scaled to 140 million, 700 million, and 1.7 billion parameters. Across over 1,000 disease-onset prediction tasks, ReClaim achieved a mean AUC of 75.6%, substantially outperforming disease-specific LightGBM (66.3%) and the transformer-based Delphi model (69.4%), with the largest gains for rare diseases. These advantages held across retrospective and prospective evaluations and in external validation on two independent datasets. Performance improved monotonically with scale, and post-training added 13.8 percentage points over pre-training alone. Beyond disease prediction, ReClaim captured financial outcomes and improved real-world evidence (RWE) analyses: for healthcare expenditure forecasting it increased explained variance from 0.28 to 0.37 relative to LightGBM, and in a target trial emulation it reduced systematic bias by 72% on average relative to Delphi. Together, these results establish administrative claims as a scalable substrate for healthcare foundation models and show that learned representations generalize across time periods and data sources, supporting disease surveillance, expenditure forecasting, and RWE generation.
