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.

介绍了医院纪录摘要的任务，提出了构建一个由 109,000 个入院病例的医师所写的 “简短住院经过” 段落和相应摘要代理构成的英文文本数据集，并通过实证分析确认其高抽象性、简洁全面性、不同的组织风格，是模拟这种复杂的、多文档摘要任务的重要实例。