Experiments in Automated Generation of Discharge Summaries in Italian

Lorenzo Ruinelli, Amos Colombo, Mathilde Rochat, Sotirios Georgios Popeskou, Andrea Franchini, Sandra Mitrović, Oscar William Lithgow, Joseph Cornelius, Fabio Rinaldi


Abstract
Hospital discharge letters are a fundamental component of patient management, as they provide the crucial information needed for patient post-hospital care. However their creation is very demanding and resource intensive, as it requires consultation of several reports documenting the patient’s journey throughout their hospital stay. Given the increasing pressures on doctor’s time, tools that can draft a reasonable discharge summary, to be then reviewed and finalized by the experts, would be welcome. In this paper we present a comparative study exploring the possibility of automatic generation of discharge summaries within the context of an hospital in an Italian-speaking region and discuss quantitative and qualitative results. Despite some shortcomings, the obtained results show that a generic generative system such as ChatGPT is capable of producing discharge summaries which are relatively close to the human generated ones, even in Italian.
Anthology ID:
2024.cl4health-1.17
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Patient-Oriented Language Processing (CL4Health) @ LREC-COLING 2024
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Dina Demner-Fushman, Sophia Ananiadou, Paul Thompson, Brian Ondov
Venues:
CL4Health | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
137–144
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.cl4health-1.17
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lorenzo Ruinelli, Amos Colombo, Mathilde Rochat, Sotirios Georgios Popeskou, Andrea Franchini, Sandra Mitrović, Oscar William Lithgow, Joseph Cornelius, and Fabio Rinaldi. 2024. Experiments in Automated Generation of Discharge Summaries in Italian. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Patient-Oriented Language Processing (CL4Health) @ LREC-COLING 2024, pages 137–144, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Experiments in Automated Generation of Discharge Summaries in Italian (Ruinelli et al., CL4Health-WS 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.cl4health-1.17.pdf