  The past decade has seen an explosion in the amount of digital information
stored in electronic health records (EHR). While primarily designed for
archiving patient clinical information and administrative healthcare tasks,
many researchers have found secondary use of these records for various clinical
informatics tasks. Over the same period, the machine learning community has
seen widespread advances in deep learning techniques, which also have been
successfully applied to the vast amount of EHR data. In this paper, we review
these deep EHR systems, examining architectures, technical aspects, and
clinical applications. We also identify shortcomings of current techniques and
discuss avenues of future research for EHR-based deep learning.
