Large Language Models in Healthcare and Medical Applications: A Review

Abstract

This paper provides a systematic and in-depth examination of large language models (LLMs) in the healthcare domain, addressing their significant potential to transform medical practice through advanced natural language processing capabilities. Current implementations demonstrate LLMs’ promising applications across clinical decision support, medical education, diagnostics, and patient care, while highlighting critical challenges in privacy, ethical deployment, and factual accuracy that require resolution for responsible integration into healthcare systems. This paper provides a comprehensive understanding of the background of healthcare LLMs, the evolution and architectural foundation, and the multimodal capabilities. Key methodological aspects—such as domain-specific data acquisition, large-scale pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, prompt engineering, and in-context learning—are explored in the context of healthcare use cases. The paper highlights the trends and categorizes prominent application areas in medicine. Additionally, it critically examines the prevailing technical and social challenges of healthcare LLMs, including issues of model bias, interpretability, ethics, governance, fairness, equity, data privacy, and regulatory compliance. The survey concludes with an outlook on emerging research directions and strategic recommendations for the development and deployment of healthcare LLMs.