Assessing data relevance for automated generation of a clinical summary.

Clinicians perform many tasks in their daily work requiring summarization of clinical data. However, as technology makes more data available, the challenges of data overload become ever more significant. As interoperable data exchange between hospitals becomes more common, there is an increased need for tools to summarize information. Our goal is to develop automated tools to aid clinical data summarization. Structured interviews were conducted on physicians to identify information from an electronic health record they considered relevant to explaining the patients medical history. Desirable data types were systematically evaluated using qualitative and quantitative analysis to assess data categories and patterns of data use. We report here on the implications of these results for the design of automated tools for summarization of patient history.