Benchmarking Foundation Models with Multimodal Public Electronic Health Records

Abstract

Foundation models have emerged as a powerful approach for processing electronic health records (EHRs), offering flexibility to handle diverse medical data modalities. In this study, we present a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates the performance, fairness, and interpretability of foundation models, both as unimodal encoders and as multimodal learners, using the publicly available MIMIC-IV database. To support consistent and reproducible evaluation, we developed a standardized data processing pipeline that harmonizes heterogeneous clinical records into an analysis-ready format. We systematically compared eight foundation models, encompassing both unimodal and multimodal models, as well as domain-specific and general-purpose variants. Our findings demonstrate that incorporating multiple data modalities leads to consistent improvements in predictive performance without introducing additional bias. Through this benchmark, we aim to support the development of effective and trustworthy multimodal artificial intelligence (AI) systems for real-world clinical applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/nliulab/MIMIC-Multimodal.