How chatbots are helping doctors be more human and empathetic

Despite the drawbacks of turning to artificial intelligence in medicine, some US physicians find that ChatGPT improves their ability to communicate with patients.

Last year, Microsoft and OpenAI released the first free version of ChatGPT. Within 72 hours, doctors were using the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot.

Experts expected that ChatGPT and other A.I.-driven large language models could take over mundane tasks that eat up hours of doctors’ time and contribute to burnout, like writing appeals to health insurers or summarising patient notes. However, they found that doctors were asking ChatGPT to help them communicate with patients in a more compassionate way.

Dr Michael Pignone, the chairman of the department of internal medicine at the University of Texas at Austin, has no qualms about the help he and other doctors on his staff got from ChatGPT to communicate regularly with patients.

However, skeptics like Dr Dev Dash, who is part of the data science team at Stanford Health Care, are so far underwhelmed about the prospect of large language models like ChatGPT helping doctors. In tests performed by Dr Dash and his colleagues, they received replies that occasionally were wrong but, he said, more often were not useful or were inconsistent. If a doctor is using a chatbot to help communicate with a patient, errors could make a difficult situation worse.

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Source: New York Times, 12 June 2023