SimpliMED: Automatic Simplification of Cardiology Discharge Reports Using Large Language Models

Lucas Molino-Piñar, Manuel Carlos Díaz Galiano, María-Teresa Martín-Valdivia, Jose Angel Urbano-Moral, Elena Sola-Garcia


Abstract
Medical discharge reports frequently contain highly technical language that creates significant communication barriers between healthcare professionals and patients, potentially compromising treatment adherence and post-discharge care quality. In this paper, we present SimpliMED, a modular system designed to automatically simplify cardiology discharge reports using Large Language Models (LLMs) and advanced Natural Language Processing techniques (NLP). Our architecture integrates section-based preprocessing with specialized prompts, explicit handling of medical abbreviations, and therapeutic explanations of medications to enhance accessibility. We evaluate our system using a corpus of 307 anonymized cardiology discharge reports from a Spanish medical center. For abbreviation detection, our fine-tuned Small Language Model (SLM) achieves an F1-score of 0.90, significantly outperforming regex-based approaches (F1: 0.67). For medication recognition, we achieve F1-scores of 0.91 for commercial names and 0.70 for active principles. We also contribute a therapeutic dictionary containing 14,611 medications with patient-friendly explanations extracted from the Spanish Agency of Medicines. Expert evaluation by two cardiologists yields an overall quality score of 75%, with highest performance for admission reason (91%) and current illness (75%) sections. While results demonstrate the potential of LLM-based medical text simplification for Spanish clinical language, we identify areas requiring further development before clinical deployment.
Anthology ID:
2026.cl4health-1.7
Volume:
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Patient-Oriented Language Processing (CL4Health) @ LREC 2026
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Editors:
Deepak Gupta, Paul Thompson, Sophia Ananiadou, Dina Demner-Fushman
Venues:
CL4Health | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
72–81
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-cl4health-07
DOI:
10.63317/53snqjnk47xn
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lucas Molino-Piñar, Manuel Carlos Díaz Galiano, María-Teresa Martín-Valdivia, Jose Angel Urbano-Moral, and Elena Sola-Garcia. 2026. SimpliMED: Automatic Simplification of Cardiology Discharge Reports Using Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Patient-Oriented Language Processing (CL4Health) @ LREC 2026, pages 72–81, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
SimpliMED: Automatic Simplification of Cardiology Discharge Reports Using Large Language Models (Molino-Piñar et al., CL4Health 2026)
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