@inproceedings{jobanputra-etal-2026-discharge,
    title = "Discharge Instructions are not One Task: Grounding Differences Between Surgical and Non-Surgical Admissions",
    author = "Jobanputra, Mayank  and
      Xu, Justin  and
      Oza, Samarth  and
      Naseer, Hulma  and
      Wang, Yifan  and
      Veseli, Blerta  and
      Kona, Chandralekha  and
      Cui, Haochen  and
      Eyre, David  and
      Demberg, Vera",
    editor = "Demner-Fushman, Dina  and
      Ananiadou, Sophia  and
      Roberts, Kirk  and
      Tsujii, Junichi",
    booktitle = "{B}io{NLP} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.bionlp-1.34/",
    pages = "426--434",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-434-7",
    abstract = "Discharge instructions are patient-facing, safety-critical documents that guide medication use, follow-up care, and recovery after hospitalization. Because they must synthesize information across the clinical record and often include post-discharge guidance not stated verbatim in the EHR, they are a difficult target for clinical text generation. In this work, we study discharge instructions in MIMIC-IV through a grounding-first lens. Using two LLMs, we decompose each discharge instruction into medically relevant statements and verify them against the Electronic Health Record (EHR). We find that discharge instructions for Surgical admissions are much longer, averaging roughly 24{--}25 statements per admission versus 11{--}12 in Non-Surgical cases, while supported content remains similar in absolute count. The additional Surgical content is dominated by statements that are not directly stated in the record or require clinically plausible extrapolation. Through this analysis, we advocate for better grounding and completeness evaluations at a fine-grained level, establishing a foundational step toward safer and more reliable discharge-instruction generation."
}