Papers for

electronic health record teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

MedHEB evaluates medical embeddings for cross modality evidence retrieval

MedHEB: Benchmarking Medical Embeddings Across Heterogeneous Clinical Evidence

Abstract: Clinical evidence is inherently relational: medical images are interpreted with prior studies, cross-modal examinations, reports, and localized findings, and retrieving relevant evidence is therefore central to clinical interpretation. Recent foundation models increasingly encode these heterogeneous sources into shared embedding spaces, yet existing embedding evaluation often focuses on isolated matches, leaving unclear whether current models retrieve relevant evidence across changes in modality, appearance, and granularity. We introduce MedHEB, a unified benchmark with 107 retrieval tasks from 54 datasets, including both in-distribution and held-out-source evaluation, across three axes: evidence form (2D images, 3D volumes, text), pairing type (image--image, image--text, text--text, and modality-bridging visual matching), and relevance granularity (global, question-conditioned, region-level). Under a single ranking protocol, MedHEB varies clinically relevant evidence definitions to test whether embedding proximity remains meaningful across heterogeneous evidence, including modality-bridging visual retrieval and region-level text-to-region retrieval. Across representative models, performance is uneven across retrieval families: models strong on conventional image--text or text--text retrieval are less reliable on modality-bridging and region-level tasks. Current embedding spaces capture some clinical relationships well but do not yet provide balanced retrieval across heterogeneous evidence. We further provide MedEmb, an MLLM-based reference embedding model trained on the MedHEB ID split, as a reproducible baseline for unified 2D--3D--text medical retrieval. We release MedHEB with preprocessing scripts, evaluation code, access manifests, and MedEmb to support research on clinically meaningful medical embeddings.

Mon 2 NovComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Medical information comes in many forms like images, volumes, and text, which together help doctors understand diseases. The authors created MedHEB, a big test set with many different tasks, to see if current computer models can find related medical evidence across these different types. They found models work well in simple cases but have trouble linking evidence across different forms, like matching a text description to a specific image region. MedHEB also includes a baseline model and tools to help improve medical information retrieval for clinical use.
Open → 2611.02519v1

Personal intelligence agent turns health talks into clear medical records

PIA: A Personal Intelligence Agent Turning Health Conversations into Records and Records into Understanding

Abstract: General-purpose agent memory summarizes conversations: it extracts salient snippets, embeds them, and retrieves the top-k into the prompt. A health agent cannot run on summaries: a dose becomes a sentence, "since last week" is resolved at the model's discretion, and a three-month glucose trend cannot be answered by text similarity. We present PIA, a personal intelligence agent deployed alongside a consumer health agent. PIA receives the agent's natural-language requests, decides for itself whether and how to write or read, and turns conversations into typed clinical records and records into a synthesized understanding of the user. Its memory harness consists of four controls -- extraction, memory, retrieval, and understanding -- each a domain-agnostic mechanism with a pluggable health module: schema, medical alias dictionary, knowledge graph, and temporal rules. We show how the same query receives a different answer as the memory injected into the response context deepens from one-dimensional recall, to a two-dimensional health snapshot, to a three-dimensional trajectory with causality, and report lessons from operation: self-reported health data are missing not at random, question phrasing governs the quality of synthesized understanding, and nearly a third of candidate causal links are structural noise that rules alone remove.

Fri 25 SeptComputation and Language
The gist
Conversations about health are often complex and hard for computers to turn into useful information. The authors created PIA, a smart helper that listens to health chats and makes clear, organized medical records from them. PIA can also understand a person's health journey over time, not just repeat past info. This helps answer tricky questions like changes in medication or blood sugar trends more accurately. The team also found that the way questions are asked can affect how well PIA understands the health information.
Open → 2609.31255v1