TemporalMed: Advancing Medical Dialogues with Time-Aware Responses in Large Language Models

Yuyan Chen, Jin Zhao, Zhihao Wen, Zhixu Li, Yanghua Xiao

Abstract: Medical dialogue models predominantly emphasize generating coherent and clinically accurate responses. However, in many clinical scenarios, time plays a pivotal role, often dictating subsequent patient management and interventions. Recognizing the latent importance of temporal dynamics, this paper introduces a novel dimension to medical dialogues: timestamps. We advocate that the integration of time-sensitive directives can profoundly impact medical advice, using an illustrative example of post-surgery care with and without timestamps. Our contributions are three-fold: Firstly, we highlight the intrinsic significance of timestamps in medical conversations, marking a paradigm shift in dialogue modeling. Secondly, we present an innovative dataset and framework explicitly tailored for time-stamped medical dialogues, facilitating the model to not only provide medical counsel but also chronologically outline care regimens. Lastly, empirical evaluations indicate our method's proficiency in time-stamped tasks and reveal an uptick in performance in broader medical Q&A domains. Through our endeavors, we aspire to set new benchmarks in patient-centric and time-sensitive medical dialogue systems.