In recent years, there have been remarkable advances in healthcare thanks to artificial intelligence. A major milestone was the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, which completely transformed the way AI tools are integrated into our daily lives, including the field of healthcare. This article explores some of the advantages and limitations that ChatGPT offers clinicians.
Benefits
One notable benefit is the demonstrated potential of ChatGPT in advancing AI-assisted medical education. Achieved an accuracy rate of nearly 50% on several US Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE), exceeding 60% in certain analyses. This performance brings the model closer to passing range, setting a new benchmark for AI models.
Another valuable use case is ChatGPT’s ability to generate formal research articles with eloquent vocabulary and a pleasant tone. It is highly efficient for summarizing texts and documents, saving medical professionals valuable time by extracting relevant information from the document, such as symptoms, treatments, lab results, or imaging reports.
ChatGPT supports more than 50 languages and by leveraging its multilingual capabilities, it enables efficient and accurate translation of research articles in different languages, facilitating global collaboration and knowledge sharing.
ChatGPT streamlines the record-keeping process by generating automated patient summaries and medical records. Health professionals can dictate their notes, allowing the model to extract key details such as symptoms, diagnoses, treatments, and relevant information from patient records.
in a recent study, ChatGPT showed its reliability as a conversational agent to collect information from patients with various diseases. Participants found it easy to use (94%) and perceived it as a valuable support for patient empowerment (88%).
According to a previous study, there is a global need for approximately 6.4 million physicians to achieve the goals of Universal Health Coverage. To address this issue, AI models like ChatGPT can serve as virtual assistants for telemedicine, especially in areas with a shortage of doctors. ChatGPT can potentially provide remote guidance and support to patients. However, it is important to note that the model can produce inaccurate results, which could be detrimental in certain cases. As a result, it is critical to closely monitor the performance of such virtual assistants.
carbon health, a US healthcare chain, leverages technology to improve accessibility of care. His you have a model powered by GPT-4 it can generate health and medical data summaries in just 4 minutes, significantly exceeding the time taken by human physicians (16 minutes). Carbon Health reports an impressive 88% acceptability rate for medical records generated by the model without the need for editing. Already deployed in over 130 clinics, this AI model has positively impacted over 600 medical staff, with one clinic reporting a 30% increase in patients treated in the same time period.
drawbacks
One of the biggest drawbacks of ChatGPT is that it performs poorly when it comes to context or nuance, which are extremely important for safe and effective healthcare. Since the model’s performance is based on the data it was trained on, any bias in the data set will lead to unfair model recommendations for underrepresented patients.
Also, depending on the quality and nature of the training dataset, the model output could be incorrect in regards to medical writing, leading to potential legal issues such as lawsuits. Furthermore, the model is trained only on data up to 2021 and is therefore not aware of recent advances in healthcare.
Models like ChatGPT also raise privacy concerns in healthcare. There is a risk of data breaches and unauthorized access to sensitive medical information. Another drawback is that ChatGPT can also be used for phishing attacks. Hackers can impersonate doctors or even access patient records.
Conclusion
In summary, while ChatGPT offers significant benefits, such as advancing medical education, generating research articles, and simplifying record-keeping, it also has limitations, including lack of context and nuance, potential bias, privacy concerns and the risk of incorrect medical information. Therefore, these drawbacks and ethical concerns need to be carefully considered before implementing ChatGPT or similar AI models in healthcare, ensuring a balance between efficiency, patient safety, and privacy.
References
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I am a civil engineering graduate (2022) from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, and I have strong interest in data science, especially in neural networks and its application in various areas.
