# Clinical foundation model for structured clinical data

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS HLTH SCI CTR HOUSTON · 2024 · $351,000

## Abstract

Abstract
In the era of big clinical data, the availability of rich real-world clinical data sources (RWcD) enables the
development of predictive models for different clinical events, bringing the potential to improve efficiency and
lower the cost of health care. However, the currently in-use models in practice are mostly trained on local data,
introducing issues of bias and lack of generalizability. We will develop comprehensive methods to efficiently
train high-quality clinical foundation model (CFM) that learn informative representations from patients'
structured clinical data either in the form of EHR or claims. Specifically, how to train CFM that can maximize
the performance boost for any downstream prediction tasks regardless of the predictive model architecture and
the size of the available training data. In this application we propose to 1) Develop a flexible framework to
intake the temporal structured clinical data elements from heterogenous sources and enrich it with existing
knowledge, 2) Optimize the foundation model architecture and pre-training strategy, 3) Develop prompting
strategies for zero/few shot learning, and 4) Evaluating CFM on multiple clinical downstream tasks.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10902073
- **Project number:** 5R01LM014249-02
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS HLTH SCI CTR HOUSTON
- **Principal Investigator:** Laila Rasmy Gindy Bekhet
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $351,000
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2023-09-01 → 2027-05-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10902073

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10902073, Clinical foundation model for structured clinical data (5R01LM014249-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-06-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10902073. Licensed CC0.

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