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Patient summaries play a crucial role in improving healthcare efficiency and the continuity of care, as they provide an accurate picture of who the patient is and how they have been doing. A good patient summary should be a narrative that synthesizes the information, provides context, and alerts downstream clinicians about any follow-ups needed by the patient. However, there is a great potential for generative AI technology to automate narrative summaries and save doctors time. By leveraging AI, healthcare providers can streamline their workflow, improve continuity of care and provide better patient outcomes.

The use of ChatGPT in healthcare can revolutionize clinical workflows, from automating patient communications and responding to patient messages to automating referral forms and converting medical language to ICD-10 codes. Despite some challenges like service reliability and potential inaccuracies, ChatGPT has impressive accuracy, having even passed the Medical Licensing Exam. While ChatGPT is not recommended to be used in clinical settings, it is an exciting technology that is worth improving and exploring.

Summarization is a difficult task for natural language processing due to the complexity of understanding the complete meaning of the source text. Long document summarization is even harder due to computational complexity, limited access to training data, and challenges with evaluating performance. To get started with NLP summarization, I  recommend finding a good pre-trained NLP model (bigger is better), fine tuning the model on a small set of high quality reference summaries, and removing extraneous data ahead of time to reduce computational complexity and potential errors.

ChatGPT predicts the optimal word to follow in a sentence based on the previous words. This model has been trained on an extensive amount of text and was built using a combination of supervised learning and reinforcement learning that involved feedback from humans. ChatGPT is a language model that predicts text, however, even though it has the capability to comprehend language and create coherent answers, it may still generate responses that are non-factual or incorrect, particularly when it comes to math

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare has grown tremendously through advancements in diagnostic imaging, personalized medicine, drug discovery, virtual assistants, and surgical robotics. As AI in healthcare evolves, it raises concerns if it will eventually replace physicians. Although AI has advantages, it could cross ethical and legal boundaries that we deem are inappropriate for our society. It is crucial that we consider these challenges and implications in the healthcare industry.

On average, doctors spend two minutes on documentation in EMRs for every minute spent with patients. Recently startups have been focused on automating clinical notes primarily using natural language processing  (NLP).  This new technology can be used to build templates, chatbots, voice to text technologies and medical summaries that help physicians improve their workflow. 

ChatGPT, the new AI chat bot model released by OpenAI, is a game-changer for the AI industry thanks to its incredible fluency and creativity. Although it has a great potential for applications in healthcare, ChatGPT is not meant for interacting with medical data as it doesn’t recognize when an information is wrong, nor has predictive capabilities constrained.

Transformers are a machine learning sequence-to-sequence model developed by Google in 2017. They can accurately predict deep relationships within sentences and successfully perform tasks such as document classification, summarization and question and answering. Transformers are crucial for creating a narrative summary in healthcare as they have very high accuracy levels and are easy to maintain when put into production. 

There are two approaches to summarize information: extractive summarization which copies the most relevant sentences from a text, and abstractive summarization which generates new sentences. Abstractive summarization is the most promising method for automated text summarization and has recently been possible thanks to the advancement of the NLP transformer models.

The Continuity of Care Document (CCD) is a summary that contains data about patient’s clinical information. It is used to exchange information between providers, but doctors don't find it valuable as information is not contextualized nor prioritized by importance.

Utilization review is the process that insurance companies use to approve care for payment before patients receive it. Although it helps reduce costs, this process can be inefficient and slow down physicians work as utilization reviewer have to find information from the clinical notes to approve the care.

The discharge summary is a narrative document for communicating clinical information about what happened to the patient in the hospital. It’s extremely important for telling primary care doctors and other outpatient providers which follow-ups are needed for the patient.