Medical Dialogue Summarization for Automated Reporting in Healthcare

Healthcare providers generally spend excessive time on administrative tasks at the expense of direct patient care. The emergence of new artificial intelligence and natural language processing technologies gives rise to innovations that could relieve them of this burden. In this paper, we present a pipeline structure for building dialogue summarization systems. Our pipeline summarizes a consultation of a patient with a care provider and automatically generates a report compliant with medical formats. Four pipeline components are used to generate a report based on audio input. The outputs of each component are analyzed to determine the most important challenges and issues. The current proof-of-concept, which was applied to eight doctor-to-patient sessions concerning ear infection, shows that automatic dialogue summarization and reporting is achievable, but requires improvements to increase completeness.