One of the debates surrounding
ChatGPT
is its role in medicine.
Now, an experiment with healthcare professionals found that this
artificial intelligence outperforms doctors
in providing high-quality, empathic responses to written questions from patients.
Although artificial intelligence (AI) will not replace the doctor, the JAMA Internal Medicine article suggests that professionals working together with technologies like
ChatGPT could "revolutionize medicine
," says the University of California at San Diego, responsible for the study.
Led by John W. Ayers, the study compared the written responses that physicians and ChatGPT gave to patient questions.
According to the results, the group of professionals who evaluated them preferred the AI responses 79% of the time, and rated them as higher
quality and more empathetic
.
How to implement ChatGPT in medicine
The team set out to find out if the artificial intelligence powered by Open AI
can accurately answer
the questions that patients send to their doctors.
If so, the researchers say, AI models could
be integrated into healthcare systems
to improve physician responses to questions submitted by patients, especially after the Covid-19 pandemic with which
virtual assistance
was accelerated
, thus alleviating the increasing burden on physicians.
OpenAI is the company that develops ChatGPT.
Photo: REUTERS.
To obtain a large and diverse sample of questions and answers from physicians that did not contain any personally identifiable information, the team turned to AskDocs on the Reddit
forum platform
.
In this, users post questions that are answered by verified health professionals.
Although anyone can answer a question, the moderators verify the professionals' credentials and the answers show the respondent's level of credentials, explains a statement from the university.
The team randomly selected 195 AskDocs exchanges in which a verified doctor answered a public question.
He provided the original question to ChatGPT and asked it to compose an answer.
A group of three health professionals evaluated each question and the corresponding answers, without knowing if it came from a doctor or from ChatGPT.
They compared responses based on information quality and empathy, noting which they preferred.
The panel of evaluators preferred the responses of ChatGPT to those of the doctors in 79% of the occasions.
"ChatGPT messages responded with nuanced and accurate information, often addressing more aspects of the patient's questions than the physician's responses," said study co-author Jessica Kelley.
In addition, the
quality of the
ChatGPT responses was significantly higher than that of the physicians: responses of good or very good quality were 3.6 times higher for ChatGPT.
Even empathic or highly empathic responses were 9.8 times higher for AI.
The objective, the authors point out, is for a doctor to take advantage of this AI in his day-to-day life,
not to replace the professional
.
"These results suggest that tools like ChatGPT can efficiently write high-quality, personalized medical advice for review by physicians," described Christopher Longhurst of UC San Diego Health.
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