Literature-Augmented Clinical Outcome Prediction

We present BEEP (Biomedical Evidence-Enhanced Predictions), a novel approach for clinical outcome prediction that retrieves patient-specific medical literature and incorporates it into predictive models. 1 Based on each individual patient's clinical notes, we train language models (LMs) to find relevant papers and fuse them with information from notes to predict outcomes such as in-hospital mortality. We develop methods to retrieve literature based on noisy, information-dense patient notes, and to augment existing outcome prediction models with retrieved papers in a manner that maximizes predictive accuracy. Our approach boosts predictive performance on three important clinical tasks in comparison to strong recent LM baselines, increasing F1 by up to 5 points and precision@Top-K by a large margin of over 25%.