HypeMed: Enhancing Medication Recommendations with Hypergraph-Based Patient Relationships

TL;DR

HypeMed introduces a hypergraph-based framework that improves medication recommendations by modeling intra-visit relationships and leveraging historical data for safer, more accurate clinical decisions.

Contribution

It unifies intra-visit coherence and inter-visit augmentation through a two-stage hypergraph approach with contrastive pre-training and dynamic retrieval.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in recommendation accuracy

Reduces adverse drug interactions in predictions

Enhances safety and effectiveness of medication recommendations

Abstract

Medication recommendations aim to generate safe and effective medication sets from health records. However, accurately recommending medications hinges on inferring a patient's latent clinical condition from sparse and noisy observations, which requires both (i) preserving the visit-level combinatorial semantics of co-occurring entities and (ii) leveraging informative historical references through effective, visit-conditioned retrieval. Most existing methods fall short in one of both aspects: graph-based modeling often fragments higher-order intra-visit patterns into pairwise relations, while inter-visit augmentation methods commonly exhibit an imbalance between learning a globally stable representation space and performing dynamic retrieval within it. To address these limitations, this paper proposes HypeMed, a two-stage hypergraph-based framework unifying intra-visit coherence modeling and inter-visit augmentation. HypeMed consists of two core modules: MedRep for representation pre-training, and SimMR for similarity-enhanced recommendation. In the first stage, MedRep encodes clinical visits as hyperedges via knowledge-aware contrastive pre-training, creating a globally consistent, retrieval-friendly embedding space. In the second stage, SimMR performs dynamic retrieval within this space, fusing retrieved references with the patient's longitudinal data to refine medication prediction. Evaluation on real-world benchmarks shows that HypeMed outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both recommendation precision and DDI reduction, simultaneously enhancing the effectiveness and safety of clinical decision support.