Summarization of clinical narratives is a long-standing research problem. Here, we introduce the task of hospital-course summarization. Given the documentation authored throughout a patient's hospitalization, generate a paragraph that tells the story of the patient admission. We construct an English, text-to-text dataset of 109,000 hospitalizations (2M source notes) and their corresponding summary proxy: the clinician-authored "Brief Hospital Course" paragraph written as part of a discharge note. Exploratory analyses reveal that the BHC paragraphs are highly abstractive with some long extracted fragments; are concise yet comprehensive; differ in style and content organization from the source notes; exhibit minimal lexical cohesion; and represent silver-standard references. Our analysis identifies multiple implications for modeling this complex, multi-document summarization task.
@article{arxiv.2105.00816,
title = {What's in a Summary? Laying the Groundwork for Advances in Hospital-Course Summarization},
author = {Griffin Adams and Emily Alsentzer and Mert Ketenci and Jason Zucker and Noémie Elhadad},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.00816},
year = {2021}
}