# Question-Answering Based Summarization of Electronic Health Records using Retrieval Augmented Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.01469 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01469/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Medical and biomedical RAG, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 4 of its 9 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jan 2024.

## Placed in

- Retrieval-augmented generation / [Medical and biomedical RAG](https://mlsanity.com/rag/medical-and-biomedical-rag/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Natural Language Processing in Electronic Health Records in Relation to Healthcare Decision-making: A Systematic Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12834/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Robust Benchmarking for Machine Learning of Clinical Entity Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.16127/) (2020)
- [Neural Summarization of Electronic Health Records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15222/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [A Comprehensive Survey on Process-Oriented Automatic Text Summarization with Exploration of LLM-Based Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02901/) (2024)
- [EHR-RAGp: Retrieval-Augmented Prototype-Guided Foundation Model for Electronic Health Records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12335/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Summarization of electronic health records (EHRs) can substantially minimize 'screen time' for both patients as well as medical personnel. In recent years summarization of EHRs have employed machine learning pipelines using state of the art neural models. However, these models have produced less than adequate results that are attributed to the difficulty of obtaining sufficient annotated data for training. Moreover, the requirement to consider the entire content of an EHR in summarization has resulted in poor performance due to the fact that attention mechanisms in modern large language models (LLMs) adds a quadratic complexity in terms of the size of the input. We propose here a method that mitigates these shortcomings by combining semantic search, retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and question-answering using the latest LLMs. In our approach summarization is the extraction of answers to specific questions that are deemed important by subject-matter experts (SMEs). Our approach is quite efficient; requires minimal to no training; does not suffer from the 'hallucination' problem of LLMs; and it ensures diversity, since the summary will not have repeated content but diverse answers to specific questions.