  Hospital discharge documentation is among the most essential, yet
time-consuming documents written by medical practitioners. The objective of
this study was to automatically generate hospital discharge summaries using
neural network summarization models. We studied various data preparation and
neural network training techniques that generate discharge summaries. Using
nursing notes and discharge summaries from the MIMIC-III dataset, we studied
the viability of the automatic generation of various sections of a discharge
summary using four state-of-the-art neural network summarization models (BART,
T5, Longformer and FLAN-T5). Our experiments indicated that training
environments including nursing notes as the source, and discrete sections of
the discharge summary as the target output (e.g. "History of Present Illness")
improve language model efficiency and text quality. According to our findings,
the fine-tuned BART model improved its ROUGE F1 score by 43.6% against its
standard off-the-shelf version. We also found that fine-tuning the baseline
BART model with other setups caused different degrees of improvement (up to 80%
relative improvement). We also observed that a fine-tuned T5 generally achieves
higher ROUGE F1 scores than other fine-tuned models and a fine-tuned FLAN-T5
achieves the highest ROUGE score overall, i.e., 45.6. For majority of the
fine-tuned language models, summarizing discharge summary report sections
separately outperformed the summarization the entire report quantitatively. On
the other hand, fine-tuning language models that were previously instruction
fine-tuned showed better performance in summarizing entire reports. This study
concludes that a focused dataset designed for the automatic generation of
discharge summaries by a language model can produce coherent Discharge Summary
sections.
