Schema-Grounded LLM Extraction for FHIR Patient Digital Twins
About
We revisit the problem of constructing interoperable patient digital twins from unstructured electronic health records (EHRs) and argue that the task is better cast not as a cascade of extraction modules but as constrained generation of a valid FHIR bundle. We introduce SG-LLM, a schema-grounded LLM extractor that (i) augments the prompt with candidate SNOMED-CT, RxNorm, and LOINC codes retrieved through a SapBERT index, (ii) decodes under a JSON Schema derived directly from FHIR R4 StructureDefinitions, and (iii) closes a validator-in-the-loop repair stage whose diagnostics are fed back as structured error messages. We argue that the twin's usefulness, not only span-level F1, is the right object of evaluation, and operationalize this with a clinical-utility experiment that measures the gap in 30-day readmission AUROC between classifiers trained on SG-LLM-generated FHIR bundles versus expert-curated ones. On MIMIC-IV and n2c2 2018 Track 2 benchmarks, SG-LLM matches or exceeds strong joint-extraction and vanilla-LLM baselines while producing substantially more valid bundles. Ablations isolate the contributions of retrieval, schema constraint, and the repair loop. All code, prompts, and schemas are released.