# What's in a Summary? Laying the Groundwork for Advances in Hospital-Course Summarization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.00816 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00816/

## Key facts

- Cited by 35 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 62 of its 126 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 62)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [HuggingFace's Transformers: State-of-the-art Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03771/) (2019)
- [REALM: Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08909/) (2020)
- [CheXpert: A Large Chest Radiograph Dataset with Uncertainty Labels and Expert Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07031/) (2019)
- [Don't Give Me the Details, Just the Summary! Topic-Aware Convolutional Neural Networks for Extreme Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08745/) (2018)
- [Get To The Point: Summarization with Pointer-Generator Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04368/) (2017)
- [BLEURT: Learning Robust Metrics for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04696/) (2020)
- [On Faithfulness and Factuality in Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00661/) (2020)
- [Abstractive Text Summarization Using Sequence-to-Sequence RNNs and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.06023/) (2016)
- [SummEval: Re-evaluating Summarization Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12626/) (2020)
- [A Discourse-Aware Attention Model for Abstractive Summarization of Long Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05685/) (2018)
- [Multi-News: a Large-Scale Multi-Document Summarization Dataset and Abstractive Hierarchical Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01749/) (2019)
- [A Neural Attention Model for Abstractive Sentence Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.00685/) (2015)
- [Generating Wikipedia by Summarizing Long Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10198/) (2018)
- [Newsroom: A Dataset of 1.3 Million Summaries with Diverse Extractive Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.11283/) (2018)
- [FEQA: A Question Answering Evaluation Framework for Faithfulness Assessment in Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03754/) (2020)
- [SummaRuNNer: A Recurrent Neural Network based Sequence Model for Extractive Summarization of Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04230/) (2016)
- [Neural Text Summarization: A Critical Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08960/) (2019)
- [Bottom-Up Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10792/) (2018)
- [Hurdles to Progress in Long-form Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06332/) (2021)
- [Fast Abstractive Summarization with Reinforce-Selected Sentence Rewriting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11080/) (2018)
- [BIGPATENT: A Large-Scale Dataset for Abstractive and Coherent Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03741/) (2019)
- [Re-evaluating Evaluation in Text Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07100/) (2020)
- [Faithful to the Original: Fact Aware Neural Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.04434/) (2017)
- [Hybrid Retrieval-Generation Reinforced Agent for Medical Image Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08298/) (2018)
- [Dialogue Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00671/) (2018)
- [Ethical Machine Learning in Health Care](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.10576/) (2020)
- [Robustness Gym: Unifying the NLP Evaluation Landscape](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04840/) (2021)
- [Discourse-Aware Neural Extractive Text Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.14142/) (2019)
- [Optimizing the Factual Correctness of a Summary: A Study of Summarizing Radiology Reports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02541/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Summarizing Patients Problems from Hospital Progress Notes Using Pre-trained Sequence-to-Sequence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08408/) (2022)
- [Leveraging Medical Knowledge Graphs Into Large Language Models for Diagnosis Prediction: Design and Application Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14321/) (2023)
- [Learning to Revise References for Faithful Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10290/) (2022)
- [PaniniQA: Enhancing Patient Education Through Interactive Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03253/) (2023)
- [Beyond Summarization: Designing AI Support for Real-World Expository Writing Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02623/) (2023)
- [Overview of the First Shared Task on Clinical Text Generation: RRG24 and "Discharge Me!"](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16603/) (2024)
- [Discharge Summary Hospital Course Summarisation of In Patient Electronic Health Record Text with Clinical Concept Guided Deep Pre-Trained Transformer Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07126/) (2022)
- [DocLens: Multi-aspect Fine-grained Evaluation for Medical Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09581/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Medical Document Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01669/) (2022)
- [A Meta-Evaluation of Faithfulness Metrics for Long-Form Hospital-Course Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03948/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Annotation for Building A Suite of Clinical Natural Language Processing Tasks: Progress Note Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03035/) (2022)
- [A dataset and benchmark for hospital course summarization with adapted large language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05720/) (2024)
- [Generating EDU Extracts for Plan-Guided Summary Re-Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17779/) (2023)
- [What are the Desired Characteristics of Calibration Sets? Identifying Correlates on Long Form Scientific Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07615/) (2023)
- [Retrieving Evidence from EHRs with LLMs: Possibilities and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04550/) (2023)
- [SportsMetrics: Blending Text and Numerical Data to Understand Information Fusion in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10979/) (2024)
- [BioMamba: Domain-Adaptive Biomedical Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02600/) (2024)
- [A Method to Automate the Discharge Summary Hospital Course for Neurology Patients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06416/) (2023)
- [PULSAR: Pre-training with Extracted Healthcare Terms for Summarising Patients' Problems and Data Augmentation with Black-box Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02754/) (2023)
- [A Data-Centric Approach To Generate Faithful and High Quality Patient Summaries with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15422/) (2024)
- [SPEER: Sentence-Level Planning of Long Clinical Summaries via Embedded Entity Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02369/) (2024)
- [Exploring Optimal Granularity for Extractive Summarization of Unstructured Health Records: Analysis of the Largest Multi-Institutional Archive of Health Records in Japan](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10041/) (2022)
- [Neural Summarization of Electronic Health Records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15222/) (2023)
- [Clinical Text Deduplication Practices for Efficient Pretraining and Improved Clinical Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09469/) (2023)
- [Responsible AI Considerations in Text Summarization Research: A Review of Current Practices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11103/) (2023)
- [Large Language Model-Based Generation of Discharge Summaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06812/) (2025)
- [Clinical Notes Reveal Physician Fatigue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03077/) (2023)
- [From Triage to Discharge: A Survey of NLP Tasks, Methods, and Open Challenges in the Emergency Department](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.23627/) (2026)
- [Is In-hospital Meta-information Useful for Abstractive Discharge Summary Generation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06002/) (2023)
- [Abstract Meaning Representation for Hospital Discharge Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14101/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.