ChatGPT Continues to Prove Useful for Patient Education

The AI chatbot, ChatGPT, can issue patient education about colonoscopy effectively and using language that is easy for patients to understand. The researchers emphasized that use of ChatGPT in patient engagement is in its infancy and that it is too early to draw conclusions, but this preliminary data does indicate that chatbots could help fill in patient education gaps amid a worrisome provider shortage. “Especially in the current era of shared decision-making and consumerization of healthcare, patients have been actively consuming MI through multiple channels and accessing providers through electronic patient portals in an exponential magnitude, which has the potential to benefit patients but simultaneously represents a heavy burden for providers and staff,” they wrote in the study. “We envision that AI-generated MI, with appropriate provider oversight, accreditation, and periodic surveillance, could improve efficiency of care and free providers for more cognitively- intensive patient communications. ”But there are still some potential pitfalls, the researchers added. For one thing, ChatGPT is still trained on the internet, and there is the possibility that medical misinformation makes its way into ChatGPT answers. And even though the ChatGPT answers had higher average ease of understanding scores, health literacy is still a problem, the research team said. The AI-generated answers were more understandable according to the physician reviewers, but they still exceed the eighth-grade reading level experts suggest health information be communicated in.