Evaluating Hospital Course Summarization by an Electronic Health Record–Based Large Language Model

Hospital course (HC) summarization represents an increasingly onerous discharge summary component for physicians. Literature supports large language models (LLMs) for HC summarization, but whether physicians can effectively partner with electronic health record-embedded LLMs to draft HCs is unknown. To compare the editing effort required by time-constrained resident physicians to improve LLM- vs physician-generated HCs toward a novel 4Cs (complete, concise, cohesive, and confabulation-free) HC. Quality improvement study using a convenience sample of 10 internal medicine resident editors, 8 hospitalist evaluators, and randomly selected general medicine admissions in December 2023 lasting 4 to 8 days at New York University Langone Health. Residents and hospitalists reviewed randomly assigned patient medical records for 10 minutes. Residents blinded to author type who edited each HC pair (physician and LLM) for quality in 3 minutes, followed by comparative ratings by attending hospitalists. Editing effort was quantified by analyzing the edits that occurred on the HC pairs after controlling for length (percentage edited) and the degree to which the original HCs' meaning was altered (semantic change). Hospitalists compared edited HC pairs with A/B testing on the 4Cs (5-point Likert scales converted to 10-point bidirectional scales). Among 100 admissions, compared with physician HCs, residents edited a smaller percentage of LLM HCs (LLM mean SD, 31.5% 16.6% vs physicians, 44.8% 20.0%; P < .001). Additionally, LLM HCs required less semantic change (LLM mean SD, 2.4% 1.6% vs physicians, 4.9% 3.5%; P < .001). Attending physicians deemed LLM HCs to be more complete (mean SD difference LLM vs physicians on 10-point bidirectional scale, 3.00 5.28; P < .001), similarly concise (mean SD, -1.02 6.08; P = .20), and cohesive (mean SD, 0.70 6.14; P = .60), but with more confabulations (mean SD, -0.98 3.53; P = .002). The composite scores were similar (mean SD difference LLM vs physician on 40-point bidirectional scale, 1.70 14.24; P = .46). Electronic health record-embedded LLM HCs required less editing than physician-generated HCs to approach a quality standard, resulting in HCs that were comparably or more complete, concise, and cohesive, but contained more confabulations. Despite the potential influence of artificial time constraints, this study supports the feasibility of a physician-LLM partnership for writing HCs and provides a basis for monitoring LLM HCs in clinical practice.