Can GPT-3.5 generate and code discharge summaries?

Objectives The aim of this study was to investigate GPT-3.5 in generating and coding medical documents with International Classification of Diseases (ICD)-10 codes for data augmentation on low-resource labels. Materials and Methods Employing GPT-3.5 we generated and coded 9606 discharge summaries based on lists of ICD-10 code descriptions of patients with infrequent (or generation) codes within the MIMIC-IV dataset. Combined with the baseline training set, this formed an augmented training set. Neural coding models were trained on baseline and augmented data and evaluated on an MIMIC-IV test set. We report micro- and macro-F1 scores on the full codeset, generation codes, and their families. Weak Hierarchical Confusion Matrices determined within-family and outside-of-family coding errors in the latter codesets. The coding performance of GPT-3.5 was evaluated on prompt-guided self-generated data and real MIMIC-IV data. Clinicians evaluated the clinical acceptability of the generated documents. Results Data augmentation results in slightly lower overall model performance but improves performance for the generation candidate codes and their families, including 1 absent from the baseline training data. Augmented models display lower out-of-family error rates. GPT-3.5 identifies ICD-10 codes by their prompted descriptions but underperforms on real data. Evaluators highlight the correctness of generated concepts while suffering in variety, supporting information, and narrative. Discussion and Conclusion While GPT-3.5 alone given our prompt setting is unsuitable for ICD-10 coding, it supports data augmentation for training neural models. Augmentation positively affects generation code families but mainly benefits codes with existing examples. Augmentation reduces out-of-family errors. Documents generated by GPT-3.5 state prompted concepts correctly but lack variety, and authenticity in narratives.