ChatGPT outperforms doctors in providing high-quality, empathetic advice on patient issues, a study shows
Posted Date – 06:20 AM, Sun – 4/30/23
New York: ChatGPT outperforms doctors in providing high-quality, empathetic advice on patient issues, according to a study.
Speculation is rife about how advances in artificial intelligence (AI) assistants like ChatGPT could be used in medicine.
The study, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, compared written responses from physicians and ChatGPT to real-world health questions.
A panel of licensed healthcare professionals preferred ChatGPT responses 79% of the time and rated ChatGPT responses as higher quality and more empathetic.
“The opportunity to improve healthcare through AI is enormous,” said John W. Ayers from the Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego.
“AI-augmented care is the future of medicine,” he added.
In the new study, the research team set out to answer the following question: Can ChatGPT accurately answer questions patients ask their doctors?
If so, AI models could be integrated into health systems to improve physician responses to questions patients ask and reduce the ever-increasing burden on physicians.
“ChatGPT may be able to pass the medical licensing exam,” says Davey Smith, Ph.D., a physician and scientist and co-director of the Altman Clinical and Translational Institute at UC San Diego, “but answering patient questions directly, accurately, and empathetically is a different story.” match.”
While the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of virtual healthcare, making care more accessible to patients, physicians are being overburdened with a flood of electronic patient information seeking medical advice that is contributing to levels of physician burnout, according to researchers reached record levels.
To see how ChatGPT could help, the team randomly sampled 195 exchanges from Reddit’s AskDocs in which a verified doctor answered a public question.
The team provided ChatGPT with the original question and asked it to write a response. A panel of three licensed healthcare professionals evaluated each question and corresponding responses, with no knowledge of whether the responses came from physicians or ChatGPT.
They compared responses based on information quality and empathy and indicated which they preferred.
The panel of healthcare professional evaluators preferred ChatGPT responses to physician responses 79% of the time.
Research has shown that ChatGPT messages respond with nuanced and precise information that often touches more aspects of a patient’s question than a doctor’s answer.
Furthermore, ChatGPT replies had significantly higher quality scores than physician replies: ChatGPT had 3.6 times as good or very good quality replies as physicians. Responses were more empathetic, too: ChatGPT had 9.8 times more empathetic or very empathetic responses than doctors.
However, the team says the ultimate solution isn’t to ditch your doctor entirely. “Instead, physicians leveraging ChatGPT are the answer to better and more caring care,” said Adam Poliak, assistant professor of computer science at Bryn Mawr College.
