Identifying clusters of people with Multiple Long-Term Conditions using Large Language Models: a population based study
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Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Identifying clusters of people with similar patterns of Multiple Long-Term Conditions (MLTC) could help healthcare services to tailor care. In this population-based study, we developed a pipeline incorporating a DeBERTa language model to generate gender-specific clusters. Our model, EHR-DeBERTa, was pre-trained on longitudinal sequences of diagnoses, medications and test results from primary care electronic health records of 5.8 million patients in the UK. EHR-DeBERTa was used to generate patient embeddings for males and females separately, and clusters were identified by K-Means. Fifteen clusters were identified in females and seventeen in males, categorized into low disease burden, mental health, cardiometabolic, respiratory, and mixed diseases. Cardiometabolic and mental health conditions showed the strongest separation across clusters, with older patients in cardiometabolic clusters. Our approach demonstrates how LLMs can provide interpretable insights into disease patterns. Future work incorporating clinical outcomes could enhance risk prediction and support precision-medicine for people with MLTC.
Date Issued
2025-07-17
Date Acceptance
2025-06-23
Citation
npj Digital Medicine, 2025, 8
ISSN
2398-6352
Publisher
Nature Portfolio
Journal / Book Title
npj Digital Medicine
Volume
8
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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Publication Status
Published
Article Number
ARTN 453