Towards Automatic Generation of Context-Based Abstractive Discharge Summaries for Supporting Transition of Care

Abstract:

Discharge summaries are essential for the transition of patients’ care but often lack sufficient information. We present an attention-based model to generate discharge summaries to support communication during the transition of care from intensive care units (ICU) to community care. We trained and evaluated our approach over 500, 000 clinical progress notes. The summaries automatically generated by our model achieve a ROUGE-L of 0.83 when comparing with discharge summaries written by health professionals. We attribute the high performance to our three-step pipeline that incorporates disease and specialist contexts to enrich the summaries with relevant information based on the context of the hospital stay. Additionally, we present a novel visualization of ICU flow of care using MIMIC-III. Our promising results have the potential to improve the pipeline of hospital discharge and continuous health care.

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