Instruction-Tuning

Electronic health records (EHRs) contain rich longitudinal information essential for clinical decision-making, yet large language models (LLMs) struggle to reason across patient timelines. We introduce \textbf{TIMER} (\textbf{T}emporal \textbf{I}nstruction \textbf{M}odeling and \textbf{E}valuation for Longitudinal Clinical \textbf{R}ecords), a method to improve LLMs’ temporal reasoning over multi-visit EHRs through time-aware instruction tuning.

Recent advancements in multimodal foundation models have showcased impressive capabilities in understanding and reasoning with visual and textual information. Adapting these foundation models trained for general usage to specialized domains like biomedicine requires large-scale domain-specific instruction datasets.