Dual-stage and Lightweight Patient Chart Summarization for Emergency Physicians
This addresses the need for efficient, privacy-preserving clinical summarization for emergency physicians, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing retrieval and generation methods.
The paper tackles the problem of overwhelming unstructured clinical data in electronic health records for emergency physicians by presenting a two-stage summarization system that runs on embedded devices, achieving effective summaries in under 30 seconds while preserving patient privacy.
Electronic health records (EHRs) contain extensive unstructured clinical data that can overwhelm emergency physicians trying to identify critical information. We present a two-stage summarization system that runs entirely on embedded devices, enabling offline clinical summarization while preserving patient privacy. In our approach, a dual-device architecture first retrieves relevant patient record sections using the Jetson Nano-R (Retrieve), then generates a structured summary on another Jetson Nano-S (Summarize), communicating via a lightweight socket link. The summarization output is two-fold: (1) a fixed-format list of critical findings, and (2) a context-specific narrative focused on the clinician's query. The retrieval stage uses locally stored EHRs, splits long notes into semantically coherent sections, and searches for the most relevant sections per query. The generation stage uses a locally hosted small language model (SLM) to produce the summary from the retrieved text, operating within the constraints of two NVIDIA Jetson devices. We first benchmarked six open-source SLMs under 7B parameters to identify viable models. We incorporated an LLM-as-Judge evaluation mechanism to assess summary quality in terms of factual accuracy, completeness, and clarity. Preliminary results on MIMIC-IV and de-identified real EHRs demonstrate that our fully offline system can effectively produce useful summaries in under 30 seconds.