One of the discussions about ChatGPT is its role in medicine. Now, an experiment with health professionals has found that this artificial intelligence surpasses the doctors in providing high-quality, empathetic responses to written patient questions.
Although the 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 in San Diego, responsible for the study.
Directed by John W Ayers, the study compared the written responses that doctors and ChatGPT gave to questions from patients. According to resultsthe group of professionals who evaluated them preferred the AI responses 79% of the time, and rated them as higher quality and more empathetic.
He equipment set out to find out if ChatGPT can accurately answer the questions that patients send to their doctors.
If so, the researchers say, the Models AI could be integrated into healthcare systems to improve physician responses to questions submitted by patients, especially after the coronavirus pandemic. covid-19 with which virtual assistance was accelerated, thus alleviating the increasing burden on physicians.
To obtain a broad and diverse sample of questions and responses from physicians that did not contain personal information identifiable, the team turned to “AskDocs” on the Reddit forum platform.
In this the users They post questions that are answered by verified healthcare professionals. Although anyone can answer a question, moderators check the credentials of the professionals and the answers show the level of credentials of the respondent, explains a statement from the university.
The team randomly selected 195 exchanges from AskDocs in which a verified doctor answered a public question. She 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.
He panel of raters preferred ChatGPT responses to physician responses 79% of the time.
“ChatGPT messages responded with information nuanced and precise, often addressing more aspects of the patient’s questions than the physicians’ answers,” he said. Jessica Kellyco-author of the study.
Besides, the quality of ChatGPT responses was significantly higher than that of doctors: responses of good or very good quality were 3.6 times higher for ChatGPT
The responses were also more empathetic: the empathic responses or very empathetic were 9.8 times higher for AI.
He aimthe 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 write efficiently high-quality, personalized medical advice for review by physicians,” says Christopher Longhurst, of UC San Diego Health.