# e-Health CSIRO at "Discharge Me!" 2024: Generating Discharge Summary Sections with Fine-tuned Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.02723 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02723/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [DExperts: Decoding-Time Controlled Text Generation with Experts and Anti-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03023/) (2021)
- [Deduplicating Training Data Mitigates Privacy Risks in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06539/) (2022)
- [AlignScore: Evaluating Factual Consistency with a Unified Alignment Function](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16739/) (2023)
- [Adapted Large Language Models Can Outperform Medical Experts in Clinical Text Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07430/) (2023)
- [LongT5: Efficient Text-To-Text Transformer for Long Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07916/) (2021)
- [Camels in a Changing Climate: Enhancing LM Adaptation with Tulu 2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10702/) (2023)
- [A Contrastive Framework for Neural Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06417/) (2022)
- [ACI-BENCH: a Novel Ambient Clinical Intelligence Dataset for Benchmarking Automatic Visit Note Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02022/) (2023)
- [Learning to Decode Collaboratively with Multiple Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03870/) (2024)
- [Automated Clinical Coding: What, Why, and Where We Are?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11092/) (2022)
- [CUED at ProbSum 2023: Hierarchical Ensemble of Summarization Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05317/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Overview of the First Shared Task on Clinical Text Generation: RRG24 and "Discharge Me!"](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16603/) (2024)
- [Towards Conditioning Clinical Text Generation for User Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17571/) (2025)
- [From Triage to Discharge: A Survey of NLP Tasks, Methods, and Open Challenges in the Emergency Department](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.23627/) (2026)
- [CareTransition-Audit: A Benchmark to Audit Discharge Summaries for Efficient Care Transitions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05435/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Clinical documentation is an important aspect of clinicians' daily work and often demands a significant amount of time. The BioNLP 2024 Shared Task on Streamlining Discharge Documentation (Discharge Me!) aims to alleviate this documentation burden by automatically generating discharge summary sections, including brief hospital course and discharge instruction, which are often time-consuming to synthesize and write manually. We approach the generation task by fine-tuning multiple open-sourced language models (LMs), including both decoder-only and encoder-decoder LMs, with various configurations on input context. We also examine different setups for decoding algorithms, model ensembling or merging, and model specialization. Our results show that conditioning on the content of discharge summary prior to the target sections is effective for the generation task. Furthermore, we find that smaller encoder-decoder LMs can work as well or even slightly better than larger decoder based LMs fine-tuned through LoRA. The model checkpoints from our team (aehrc) are openly available.