Electronic health records (EHRs) store patient medical history in the structured data format, which facilitates automatic healthcare risk prediction, thereby improving personalized healthcare management and treatment. There are two main categories of methods for automatic healthcare risk prediction. The first models time-series information or relationships between visits for enhanced patient representations. However, given the high dimensionality nature of the EHR data, it often obtains compromise results due to the lack of training data. The second exploits external knowledge, e.g., knowledge graphs (KGs), to augment the training data, but less attention has been paid to distinguishing the importance of features and filtering out irrelevant external knowledge, leading to overwhelming noise and inefficiency. Additionally, the joint relationships between patient features were not emphasized, which are highlighted in clinical practice. In this paper, we propose an efficient Path Filtering with Causal Analysis (PFCA) approach for enhanced healthcare risk prediction to address these challenges. PFCA first extracts personalized knowledge graphs (PKGs) consisting of paths linking the patient's features to targets and then devises a fine-grained filtering method based on path messages to remove irrelevant paths for better efficiency. Then we develop an effective similarity-based method to model different features' joint interactions with targets to learn augmented representations for each feature. Furthermore, we design a causal analysis method that includes a novel causal intervention mechanism to mine and prioritize causal features for improved predictive performance. Finally, by exploiting the attention weights of paths in the PKGs, PFCA provides target-oriented interpretations, showing how patients' features lead to targets through significant paths. Experimental results on three public real-world datasets and four healthcare risk prediction tasks confirm PFCA's effectiveness in improving predictive performance compared to ten state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrate its efficiency of path filtering and interpretability.

The generation of medical dialogue notes is essential in healthcare, providing a structured recapitalization of patient-provider interactions. Medical notes are rigorously organized into various sections, including Chief Complaint, History of Present Illness and more. Each section serves a specific purpose to record detailed medical content. Traditionally, this task is labor-intensive, requiring physicians to manually create notes, a process prone to errors. With advancements in AI, it is now feasible to automate the generation of medical notes. There are mainly two categories of methods for automatic medical note generation. Pre-trained language models (PLMs) struggle with unstructured outputs, limited datasets, and inadequate medical terminology. In-context learning (ICL) methods improve accuracy and reduce data requirements but still produce unstructured notes and require high time and cost. To tackle the above challenges, we propose a three-module framework, called CE-DEPT, for accurate, efficient and cost-effective medical note generation. Specifically, the Task Decomposition Module breaks down complete medical dialogues into section-specific dialogues to ensure relevance and accuracy. The Batch Combination Module groups these sections into batches based on disease similarity to reduce costs and improve efficiency. The Note Generation Module employs batch prompting with ICL to generate each section note, followed by combining them into a structured, comprehensive medical note. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrated the effectiveness of Task Decomposition and Batch Prompting. Our method, CE-DEPT outperforms the best method by 5% on the ROUGE-1 score, 3% on the Bertscore-F1, a cost-effectiveness improvement of 15%, and a reduction in time consumption of 25% at peak accuracy.

Electronic Health Records, which contain abundant structured data information of the patients, can help clinicians and data scientists address complex medical issues, particularly medication recommendation. The recommendation of medications is crucial for accurate and timely prescriptions. It is a nuanced task that entails analyzing various sources of healthcare data. Traditional medication recommendation is performed manually, which is labor-intensive and error-prone. The development of Electronic Health Records enables automatic medication recommendation. There are mainly two categories of methods for automatic medication recommendation. The first category uses the patients' current visit information and the drug-drug interactions (DDI). For these methods, both the comprehensive patient's medical history and the significant medication-diagnosis knowledge are not exploited appropriately. The second category utilizes longitudinal patient data, but different history visits are incorporated indiscriminately. Furthermore, in clinical practice, the associations between historical medications and future prescriptions are highlighted. However, they are less emphasized in current methods. Nevertheless, this is less emphasized by current automatic medication recommendation methods. To tackle the above challenges, we propose a three-module Discharge Medication Recommendation Network, called DMRNet, for accurate discharge medication recommendations. Specifically, the Information Integration Module combines information from the current visit and significant external knowledge e.g., the Diagnosis-Medication Co-occurrence (DMC) relationship. The Medication Retention Module is specially designed to capture the associations between the historical medications and the recommended medications. The History Retrieval Module differentiates the significance of different historical visits and incorporates them based on different significance values. Experimental evaluations on benchmark datasets, i.e., MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV, confirm DMRNet's superiority over state-of-the-art baseline methods in terms of Jaccard Similarity, F1-score, Precision and Recall.