Leveraging the power of advanced machine learning, particularly large language models (LLMs), has increasingly become a transformative element in healthcare and medicine. The applications of LLMs in healthcare are multifaceted, showing immense potential to improve patient outcomes, streamline administrative tasks, and foster medical research and innovation.

Medprompt: How to architect LLM solutions for healthcare.
Image Credit: David S. Soriano, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Architecting LLM solutions in the healthcare domain is challenging because of the intricacies associated with healthcare data and the complex nature of healthcare applications. In this post, I will give some recommendations based on the widely popular LangChain library, giving some examples.

The first step is to define the overarching problem you are trying to solve. It can be broad as in getting the right information about a patient to the doctor. Next, subdivide the problem into subproblems that can be tackled separately. For example in the above case, we need to find the patient’s health record, convert it into an easily searchable form (embedding), find areas of interest in the record and generate a summary or an answer to the specific question. Next, find solutions for each problem that may or may not require an LLM. Finally, design the orchestrator that can stitch everything together.

LangChain has some useful abstractions that will help in the last two steps. If the solution does not involve an LLM and mostly involves data retrieval and transformations, use the tool abstraction. If you need one or more LLM calls to achieve it, use the chain abstraction. Agents are the orchestrators that can stitch everything together. It is important to carefully craft the prompts for the chains and agents. Rigorous testing is vital. This includes technical performance and validation of the model’s recommendations by healthcare professionals to ensure they are accurate and clinically relevant.

MEDPrompt coming soon!

Bell Eapen
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