2023-07-01 19:23:21
Last fall, OpenAI released the first free version of ChatGPT. Within 72 hours, the AI-powered chatbot was being used by doctors.
“I was excited and amazed, but a little alarmed to be honest,” said Peter Lee, corporate vice president of research and incubation at Microsoft, which invested in OpenAI. He and other experts hoped that ChatGPT and other AI-powered long-language models might take over mundane tasks that consume hours of doctors’ time. However, he worried that artificial intelligence also offered a tempting shortcut to finding diagnoses and medical information that might be incorrect or even fabricated.
But what was most surprising to Lee was a use he hadn’t anticipated—doctors were asking ChatGPT to help them communicate with patients in a more compassionate way.
In one survey, 85 percent of patients reported that a doctor’s compassion was more important than wait time or cost. In another, almost three-quarters said they had gone to doctors who were not compassionate. And a study of doctors’ conversations with the families of patients found that many were not empathetic.
But now doctors are using chatbots to find the words to deliver bad news and express concerns regarding a patient’s suffering, or simply to explain recommendations more clearly.
But Michael Pignone, chair of the department of internal medicine at the University of Texas at Austin, has no qualms regarding the help his staff received from ChatGPT. He explained: “We were doing a project to improve treatments for alcohol use disorder. How do we engage patients who have not responded to behavioral interventions?” He asked his team to write a script to speak compassionately with these patients. “A week later, no one had done it,” he said. So he tried ChatGPT, which responded instantly with all the talking points they wanted.
However, social workers said the script needed to be adapted for patients with little medical knowledge. ChatGPT rewrote it at a basic reading level, with a reassuring introduction:
If you think you drink too much alcohol, you’re not alone. Many people have this problem, but there are medications that can help you feel better and lead a healthier, happier life.
This was followed by an explanation of the pros and cons of the treatment options. The team started using the script.
Skeptics like Dev Dash, a member of the data science team at Stanford Health Care in California, aren’t impressed by the prospect of long-language models like ChatGPT helping doctors.
In tests by Dash and his colleagues, they received answers that were occasionally wrong, but, he said, more often they were unhelpful or inconsistent. “I’ve heard that residents use it to guide clinical decision making,” he said. “I don’t think it’s appropriate.”
Microsoft, with OpenAI, gave some doctors, including Isaac Kohane, a professor of biomedical informatics at Harvard Medical School, early access to GPT-4, the updated version of ChatGPT that launched in March for a monthly fee.
Kohane said he approached it as a skeptic, but testing it had left him “shocked.”
He is part of a network of doctors who help decide if patients qualify for an evaluation in a program for people with undiagnosed illnesses. He spends a lot of time reading the letters referring patients and their medical histories and then deciding if they are accepted. But when he shared that information with ChatGPT, “he was able to accurately decide in a matter of minutes what it took doctors a month to do,” Kohane said.
Richard Stern, a rheumatologist in Dallas, Texas, said GPT-4 writes friendly responses to his patients’ emails and takes care of burdensome paperwork. He recently asked her to write an appeal letter to an insurer. His patient had a chronic inflammatory disease and had received no relief from standard medications. Stern wanted the insurer to pay for off-label use of anakinra, which costs regarding $1,500 a month. The insurer had denied coverage and he wanted me to reconsider.
It was the kind of letter that would take Stern a few hours to write, but it took ChatGPT only a few minutes. After receiving the letter from the bot, the insurer agreed to the request.
“It’s like a new world,” Stern said.
GINA KOLATA
THE NEW YORK TIMES
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6769407, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-06-20 21:00:07
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