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Medical documentation, including discharge notes, is crucial for ensuring patient care quality, continuity, and effective medical communication. However, the manual creation of these documents is not only time-consuming but also prone to inconsistencies and potential errors. The automation of this documentation process using artificial intelligence (AI) represents a promising area of innovation in healthcare. This study directly addresses the inefficiencies and inaccuracies in creating discharge notes manually, particularly for cardiac patients, by employing AI techniques, specifically large language model (LLM). Utilizing a substantial dataset from a cardiology center, encompassing wide-ranging medical records and physician assessments, our research evaluates the capability of LLM to enhance the documentation process. Among the various models assessed, Mistral-7B distinguished itself by accurately generating discharge notes that significantly improve both documentation efficiency and the continuity of care for patients. These notes underwent rigorous qualitative evaluation by medical expert, receiving high marks for their clinical relevance, completeness, readability, and contribution to informed decision-making and care planning. Coupled with quantitative analyses, these results confirm Mistral-7B's efficacy in distilling complex medical information into concise, coherent summaries. Overall, our findings illuminate the considerable promise of specialized LLM, such as Mistral-7B, in refining healthcare documentation workflows and advancing patient care. This study lays the groundwork for further integrating advanced AI technologies in healthcare, demonstrating their potential to revolutionize patient documentation and support better care outcomes., Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure, 3 tables, conference

Principal Alison Harris is blunt in describing what she confronted on her arrival to Ranson IB Middle School in 2011. "I was placed in what many people would call an impossible situation," she says. During her initial visit to the school in 2009-10, she watched as students changed classes--while teachers pressed against the lockers to avoid being run over. "There was a pervasiveness of disrespect, and no order or purpose." Ranson needed safety, order, and structure--and then, major academic improvement. After struggling to improve the culture among students and staff, Harris saw the great need to recruit and retain excellent teachers. When she began at Ranson, the school needed 70 teachers. It had 42. She learned from Project L.I.F.T. (Leadership and Investment For Transformation) about Public Impact's Opportunity Culture initiative--in which schools use job redesign and technology to reach more students with excellent teachers, for more pay, within budget, and to develop all teachers on the job--and decided to bring its possibilities to Ranson. Her school design team eventually settled on two models in combination: using multi-classroom leaders, who lead a team of teachers and take accountability for their students' outcomes, for far more pay; and time-technology swap teachers (also known as blended learning teachers), whose students alternate between age- and child-appropriate digital instruction--as little as an hour daily per student--and teaching delivered in person. Harris allowed one teacher to start his multi-classroom leader role midway through 2012-13, even though other L.I.F.T. schools would not begin implementing the models until the next year. She quickly saw results, and on August 26, 2013, Ranson started a new school year fully staffed, with many more great teachers and a staff committed to its new structure and purpose. This case study looks at the planning for and early days of Ranson's Opportunity Culture work.

Tonya Kales came to Ashley Park PreK-8 as its principal (2009-2013), and confronted a school at the end of its rope. Ashley Park was a beautiful facility, but there was no learning going on in the building, it was a chaotic environment for both kids and adults. It was a hostile environment--had adults that were totally incompetent in their teaching skills--and the kids in turn were disengaged. This historically low-performing, high-need school feeds into West Charlotte High School, which holds political and historical significance in the city as an anchor for its community and as the focal point of the city's school desegregation efforts in the 1970s. But Ashley Park was sending students to West Charlotte who were in no way equipped for high school. Kales, a 22-year veteran of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS), had never seen anything like it. Kales made rapid-fire changes, bringing in new staff, changing the relationships among the grades to improve instruction, and creating a culture of caring combined with high expectations. The percentage of students meeting state standards increased by 12 percentage points in reading and 15 percentage points in math in the first year of the turnaround under Kales and Assistant Principal Jeanette Reber. Ashley Park PreK--8 School, is one of four L.I.F.T. (Leadership and Investment for Transformation) schools implementing new Opportunity Culture school models and roles.

This case study reports on the work of Denise Watts, who in 2011 was the newly named Project L.I.F.T. executive director and a Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools zone superintendent. She approached Public Impact for help in meeting the new Project L.I.F.T. (Leadership and Investment for Transformation) goals. Facing urgent needs for real change, Watts saw Public Impact's Opportunity Culture initiative--which highlights the potential of using job redesign and technology to reach more students with excellent teachers, for more pay, within budget--as a key part of the solution. In creating an Opportunity Culture, schools develop new teaching roles, form collaborative teams able to meet during school hours, and enhance teacher development. Teachers and staff have the opportunity to develop to their full potential through collaboration with and leadership from excellent teachers, and career advancement allows teachers to earn more and help more students. This would create a "win-win" for the education profession and for the thousands of students who do not have consistent, favorable circumstances to be educated by a highly effective teacher. Watts introduced the concept of an Opportunity Culture to all nine Project L.I.F.T. schools, and invited them to be the first ones to launch this work. Four schools took on the challenge: Ashley Park PreK-8, Allenbrook Elementary, Thomasboro Academy, and Ranson IB Middle School. All are historically low-performing and high-need schools that feed into West Charlotte High School, which holds political and historical significance in the city as an anchor for its community and the focal point of the city's school desegregation efforts in the 1970s. [Additional contributors to the case study were Joe Ableidinger, Bryan C. Hassel, and Emily Ayscue Hassel.]

Leading Educators works with schools and districts to maximize the leadership development of highly effective teachers. It aims to bolster the talent pipeline by identifying and training strong potential teacher-leaders, and in turn, increasing student achievement and developing teachers on its fellows' teams. The organization's leaders believe that retaining high-quality teacher-leaders and expanding their impact will increase student achievement enough to close gaps in high-need schools. Since 2011, Leading Educators has run a two-year fellowship in Kansas City and New Orleans for proven excellent teachers. This is the first in a series of case studies offering in-depth looks at how districts, charter schools, and other programs have begun using Opportunity Culture models or experimented with similar means of expanding teachers' impact on students and peer teachers. This study profiles Anna Lavely of Kansas, who participates in Leading Educators' two-year fellowship aimed at developing the leadership of already-excellent teachers. [This case study contains contributions from Joe Ableidinger, Bryan C. Hassel, and Emily Ayscue Hassel. Beverley Tyndall was responsible for the production of this report.]

In 2012, Touchstone Education opened its first school, Merit Preparatory Charter School of Newark ("Merit Prep Newark"), in New Jersey, with 84 sixth-graders, 90 percent of whom are low-income, with most entering Merit Prep several years behind grade level. In reading and science, Merit Prep Newark has shown strong early results in its first year: In March 2013 tests, students already demonstrated two years of growth in reading and 1.25 years of growth in science, based on the Northwest Evaluation Association's Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) assessment. This is one in a series of case studies looking at how districts, charter schools, and other programs have begun using Opportunity Culture models or experimented with similar means of expanding teachers' impact on students and peer teachers. In "Touchstone Education: New Charter With Experienced Leader Learns From Extending Teachers' Reach," the authors take a first look at this small first-year school within a charter school organization that has big plans for growth, and see how it combined versions of two Opportunity Culture models: Multi-Classroom Leadership and a Time-Technology Swap for strong reading results. [This report was written with contributions from Joe Ableidinger, Bryan C. Hassel, and Emily Ayscue Hassel.]

This report highlights 10 of the most advanced and talked-about teacher evaluation systems nationally: Delaware; Rhode Island; Tennessee; Hillsborough County, Florida; Houston, Texas; New Haven, Connecticut; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Washington, DC (referred to throughout just as Washington); Achievement First (a charter management organization, or CMO); and the Relay Graduate School of Education in New York City. Together, these systems serve more than 1.6 million students each year. These are not the only systems taking on this work, but they are trailblazers. None of the sites featured would say they have fully "figured out" teacher evaluation. Nor do the authors hold them up as examples of perfection. Yet they have all worked long and hard to carefully and thoughtfully tackle the most difficult challenges related to developing and implementing a high-quality teacher evaluation system. This report consists of four components: (1) A brief which provides an overview of the report and background on the topics addressed in the other documents, including key questions, implementation options and trade-offs, and key terms; (2) A cross-site analysis that looks across all 10 sites and summarizes key components of their evaluation systems; (3) 10 detailed profiles of the teacher evaluation systems at our featured sites; and (4) A library of documents that are the building blocks of the 10 systems. Individual site profiles contain sources. (Contains 36 footnotes.) [This paper was created with 50CAN and Public Impact. Funding for this paper was provided by H. A. Vance Foundation.]