Data-to-text summarisation of patient records: using computer-generated summaries to access patient histories.

Objective: We assess the efficacy and utility of automatically generated textual summaries of patients' medical histories at the point of care.

Method: Twenty-one clinicians were presented with information about two cancer patients and asked to answer key questions. For each clinician, the information on one of the patients comprised their official hospital records, and for the other patient it comprised summaries that were computer-generated by a natural language generation system from data extracted from the official records.