Discharge Summary

Discharge summaries, crucial documents summarizing a patient's hospital stay, are increasingly being automated using natural language generation (NLG) techniques. Current research focuses on improving the accuracy and clinical relevance of automatically generated summaries, particularly the "Brief Hospital Course" and "Discharge Instructions" sections, employing large language models (LLMs) fine-tuned with various prompting strategies and hybrid approaches combining extractive and abstractive methods. This research aims to alleviate physician workload, improve documentation consistency, and enhance patient care by streamlining the creation of these essential clinical reports, with some studies demonstrating promising results in terms of both efficiency and clinical acceptability.