Towards Generating Personalized Hospitalization Summaries
Most of the health documents, including patient education materials and discharge notes, are usually flooded with medical jargons and contain a lot of generic information about the health issue. In addition, patients are only provided with the doctor{'}s perspective of what happened to them in the hospital while the care procedure performed by nurses during their entire hospital stay is nowhere included. The main focus of this research is to generate personalized hospital-stay summaries for patients by combining information from physician discharge notes and nursing plan of care. It uses a metric to identify medical concepts that are Complex, extracts definitions for the concept from three external knowledge sources, and provides the simplest definition to the patient. It also takes various features of the patient into account, like their concerns and strengths, ability to understand basic health information, level of engagement in taking care of their health, and familiarity with the health issue and personalizes the content of the summaries accordingly. Our evaluation showed that the summaries contain 80{\%} of the medical concepts that are considered as being important by both doctor and nurses. Three patient advisors (i.e. individuals who are trained in understanding patient experience extensively) verified the usability of our summaries and mentioned that they would like to get such summaries when they are discharged from hospital.
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