Artificial intelligence assistants such as ChatGPT may improve the ability of physicians and other healthcare professionals to provide accurate and compassionate responses to patient questions, a new study finds.
Researchers from the Qualcomm Institute within the University of California–San Diego studied the role that AI assistants could play in healthcare by comparing written responses from physicians with those from ChatGPT to answer real-world health questions.
After evaluating the responses, a panel of licensed healthcare professionals preferred ChatGPT’s responses 79% of the time over the physician’s responses, rating the ChatGPT’s responses as higher-quality and more empathetic.
“The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated virtual healthcare adoption,” study co-author Eric Leas, PhD, a Qualcomm Institute affiliate and assistant professor in the UC San Diego Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science, said in a news release. “While this made accessing care easier for patients, physicians are burdened by a barrage of electronic patient messages seeking medical advice that have contributed to record-breaking levels of physician burnout.”
The study’s findings were published April 28 in JAMA Internal Medicine.
In the cross-sectional study, researchers randomly selected 195 patient questions from a medical social media site. They then compared the responses of the physicians with the ChatGPT responses using the panel of licensed healthcare professionals. The researchers found that the chatbot responses were preferred over the physicians and rated higher for quality and empathy.
“ChatGPT messages responded with nuanced and accurate information that often addressed more aspects of the patient’s questions than physician responses,” Jessica Kelley, MSN, a nurse practitioner with San Diego firm Human Longevity and study co-author, said in the release.
Researchers said that the study was not designed to replace physician input but to show how AI can assist clinicians to provide better quality medical advice and care for their patients.
“Our study is among the first to show how AI assistants can potentially solve real-world healthcare delivery problems,” said Christopher Longhurst, MD, MS, chief medical officer and chief digital officer at UC San Diego Health. “These results suggest that tools like ChatGPT can efficiently draft high quality, personalized medical advice for review by clinicians, and we are beginning that process at UCSD Health.”
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