ChatGPT could help reduce A&E wait times

ChatGPT could be used to diagnose patients in a bid to reduce waiting times in emergency departments, researchers have suggested.

It comes after a study found the language model, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), “performed well” in generating a list of diagnoses for patients and suggesting the most likely option.

Researchers in the Netherlands entered the records of 30 patients who visited an emergency department in 2022, as well as anonymous doctors’ notes, into ChatGPT versions 3.5 and 4.0.

The AI analysis was compared to two clinicians who made a diagnosis based on the same information, both with and without laboratory data.

When lab data was included, doctors had the correct answer in their top five differential diagnoses in 87% of cases, compared with 97% for ChatGPT 3.5 and 87% for ChatGPT 4.0.

There was a 60% overlap between the differential diagnoses by clinicians and ChatGPT.

The team said that while ChatGPT was “able to suggest medical diagnoses much like a human doctor would”, more work is needed before it is applied in the real world.

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Source: The Independent, 13 September 2023