Papers › Extracting Social Determinants of Health from Pediatric Patient Notes Using Large...

Extracting Social Determinants of Health from Pediatric Patient Notes Using Large Language Models: Novel Corpus and Methods

31 Mar 2024arXiv:2404.00826archive 2025-07-28

Yujuan Fu, Giridhar Kaushik Ramachandran, Nicholas J Dobbins, Namu Park, Michael Leu, Abby R. Rosenberg, Kevin Lybarger, Fei Xia, Ozlem Uzuner, Meliha Yetisgen

Social determinants of health (SDoH) play a critical role in shaping health outcomes, particularly in pediatric populations where interventions can have long-term implications. SDoH are frequently studied in the Electronic Health Record (EHR), which provides a rich repository for diverse patient data. In this work, we present a novel annotated corpus, the Pediatric Social History Annotation Corpus (PedSHAC), and evaluate the automatic extraction of detailed SDoH representations using fine-tuned and in-context learning methods with Large Language Models (LLMs). PedSHAC comprises annotated social history sections from 1,260 clinical notes obtained from pediatric patients within the University of Washington (UW) hospital system. Employing an event-based annotation scheme, PedSHAC captures ten distinct health determinants to encompass living and economic stability, prior trauma, education access, substance use history, and mental health with an overall annotator agreement of 81.9 F1. Our proposed fine-tuning LLM-based extractors achieve high performance at 78.4 F1 for event arguments. In-context learning approaches with GPT-4 demonstrate promise for reliable SDoH extraction with limited annotated examples, with extraction performance at 82.3 F1 for event triggers.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

uw-bionlp/pedshac officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHub report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

In-Context Learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutGPT-4Label SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections