Medical Summarization in Practice: Design, Deployment, and Analysis of a Clinical Summarization System for a German Hospital

Moiz Rauf, Sean Papay


Abstract
Through the course of hospital treatment, a large number of electronic health records (EHRs) are created for a patient, detailingaspects of care history such as lab results, physician notes, and treatments administered.At the conclusion of treatment, this collection of EHRs must be summarized into a discharge summary,describing the course or care clearly and cohesively.In this paper, we present the design and development of a clinical summarization system integrated into a live German hospital workflowto help with the generation of discharge summaries.We first describe the system, its components, and its context of use within a hospital,before performing a number of experiments to gain insights into how best to use and evaluate our system.We investigate summarization performance across multiple input encoding strategies, compare expert judgments against automatic evaluation of summaries,and analyze the consistency of model summaries across multiple text generations.This work not only acts as a case study to demonstrate the feasibility of LLM integration into healthcare infrastructure,but also provides actionable insights into the use and evaluation of such systems.
Anthology ID:
2026.eacl-industry.34
Volume:
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track)
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Yevgen Matusevych, Gülşen Eryiğit, Nikolaos Aletras
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
455–466
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.eacl-industry.34/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Moiz Rauf and Sean Papay. 2026. Medical Summarization in Practice: Design, Deployment, and Analysis of a Clinical Summarization System for a German Hospital. In Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track), pages 455–466, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Medical Summarization in Practice: Design, Deployment, and Analysis of a Clinical Summarization System for a German Hospital (Rauf & Papay, EACL 2026)
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https://aclanthology.org/2026.eacl-industry.34.pdf