How to Write a Great Discharge Summary

[@warbler1984]

As an ER doc i endorse the idea of having clinical details that tell you a lot about the severity of the preesentation as is its a very useful comparator and not enough specialties out this in their notes

[@wejdanalzaid4315]

Can’t wait to watch this!!! I will complete my comments after completing the video as I have many thoughts on the subject

[@yazinuwa0123]

Thank youuuu❤❤❤

[@alvinchen6262]

Interested to see what the future role of AI tools will be when it comes to writing discharge summaries. ChatGPT can probably write a more accurate discharge summary than most interns and residents.

[@StrongMed]

Alvin, thanks for stopping by! Sadly, I think you may be right, mostly because of the amount of time it takes housestaff to review a complex hospitalization. However, given the lack of standardization to discharge summaries, it might require greater-than-typical prompt engineering to end up with an output in the desired format. Just this morning I heard that a resident on Stanford wards has been using our in-house HIPAA compliant version of ChatGPT for writing dc summaries. Would love to see what they look like.

[@alvinchen6262]

@@StrongMed That's great! It's only a matter of time, I think. It shouldn't be too difficult for each institution to program their GPT output to the desired format, though it remains to be seen how smart it is about synthesizing information in a logical manner and conveying the degree of certainty around each diagnosis. One of the most time consuming parts about the job is chart review, and in the future we may have AI generated summaries of patient profile rather than the scattered diagnoses that go into the "problem list."

[@EibaProductions]

What I would like to add: do not use abbreviations in discharge letters. As beautifully explained above, a discharge letter has several functions, such as being a summery of the patient's diagnoses and medications, being the source for a possible next hospitalisation. As there are plenty of abbreviations in every field of medicine, and the PCPs can't know it all. Additionally, they are a big source for errors. If you use abbreviations, only use them for common words, that are blantantly obvious, like CRP for C-reaktive protein. If you use abbreviations for diagnoses, that are somewhat common in your field of medicine and you want to use them in the summary, explain them the first time you use them (for instance in the diagnosis list). AKI might be clear for internal medicine colleagues, but the abbreviation may be not sufficiently obvious for colleagues of another specialty. For instance, the abbreviations that weren't known for me and which I had to look up, were: LLE, RLE, PUD, SNF,

[@majdfayad4019]

No thanks

[@warbler1984]

You sure?