Haochen Cui
2026
Discharge Instructions are not One Task: Grounding Differences Between Surgical and Non-Surgical Admissions
Mayank Jobanputra | Justin Xu | Samarth Oza | Hulma Naseer | Yifan Wang | Blerta Veseli | Chandralekha Kona | Haochen Cui | David Eyre | Vera Demberg
BioNLP 2026
Mayank Jobanputra | Justin Xu | Samarth Oza | Hulma Naseer | Yifan Wang | Blerta Veseli | Chandralekha Kona | Haochen Cui | David Eyre | Vera Demberg
BioNLP 2026
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.