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04-05-2023
LOS ANGELES: A recent study shows that AI-backed ChatGPT may be just as good as medics if not more useful at replying to patients’ medical queries.
A team of researchers from the University of California, San Diego; John Hopkins; and other universities asked 195 
medical questions from OpenAI’s ChatGPT and compared both the quality and the compassion of the chatbot’s answers to responses from actual physicians on Reddit.
A group of healthcare professionals, including specialists working in internal medicine, pediatrics, oncology, and infectious disease, scored both the bot and the human answers on a five-point scale, evaluating the “quality of information” and “the compassion or bedside manner” provided.
In the study, clinicians liked the chatbot’s answer to the physician’s in 78.6% of the 585 scenarios. The chatbot’s answers were rated 3.6 times higher in quality and 9.8 times higher in empathy than those of the doctors.
Medics keep it short while ChatGPT answers in detail
A major cause ChatGPT won out in the study is that the bot’s replies to queries were more extended and more personable than the doctors’ brief, time-saver solutions.
For example, when questioned whether it’s possible to go blind after getting bleach in your eye, ChatGPT responded “I’m sorry to hear that you got bleach splashed in your eye,” and offered four other sentences of description, with clear instructions on how to wash it.
The doctor just said, “Sounds like you will be fine,” and shortly instructed the patient to “flush the eye” or call poison control.
ChatGPT isn’t capable of diagnosing on its own.
However, readers should not let ChatGPT’s performance in this study mislead them. It’s still not a physician.
The results showed ChatGPT was an extremely effective online healthcare assistant, but it comes with its own built-in problems. Firstly, the responses were taken from an online forum, where physicians are answering in their free time and are completely detached from the person. There is a good chance this results in stunted and impersonal responses, which could account for some of the empathy differences.
It is therefore possible that while ChatGPT might not be the best single point of contact with healthcare, it could be an excellent way to escalate cases and prioritize workloads for already swamped physicians. The researchers suggest it could draft responses and then physicians could edit them to get the best of both worlds. One thing is for sure, AI is coming to healthcare, whether we like it or not. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
