Will A.I. Augment the Empathy of Physicians in the Patient Experience?

A.I. in healthcare's surprising turn.

Friends,

The ability of ChatGPT to improve upon the bedside manner (empathy) of Physicians is interesting to me. I often write about A.I. in healthcare here. So when this story surfaced on social media, I definitely wanted to cover it.

AI has better ‘bedside manner’ than some doctors, study finds

When Microsoft acquired Nuance I just had to assume it would one day acquire Doximity, that is basically the LinkedIn for clinicians. It’s not surprising to find ChatGPT “studies” relating to the future of healthcare. It certainly does make a good headline and PR for ChatGPT. Remember Microsoft gets most of the profits of OpenAI until the $10 billion is recouped.

A panel of healthcare professionals preferred ChatGPT's responses 79 percent of the time and rated them higher quality in terms of the information provided and more understanding. The panel did not know which was which.

The study was done by the University of California San Diego compared written replies from doctors and those from ChatGPT to real-world health queries to see which came out on top.

The study, appearing in JAMA Internal Medicine, compared written responses from human physicians and those from ChatGPT to real-world health questions.

• They found that the proportion of responses rated ’empathetic’ or ‘very empathetic’ was higher for ChatGPT than for physicians.

This study is evidence that AI tools can make doctors more efficient and accurate, and patients happier and healthier," said study co-author Mark Dredze, an associate professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University's Whiting School of Engineering, who advised the research team on the capabilities of large language models.

As you know, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Alphabet are very interesting in creating more products around the A.I. of Healthcare and related niches.

According to various clickbait, ChatGPT recently caused a stir in the medical community after it was found capable of passing the gold-standard exam required to practice medicine in the US, raising the prospect it could one day replace human doctors. 

Various sources are leveraging A.I. hype to further their own coverage. Read it here.

Study leader John W. Ayers, of the Qualcomm Institute at the University of California San Diego, says the results provide an early glimpse into the important role that artificial intelligence assistants could play in healthcare.

"The opportunities for improving healthcare with AI are massive," said Ayers, who is also vice chief of innovation in the UC San Diego School of Medicine Division of Infectious Disease and Global Public Health. "AI-augmented care is the future of medicine."

• The findings highlight the potential for AI assistants to play a role in medicine, according to the authors of the work, who suggest such agents could help draft doctors’ communications with patients.

• Workloads of physicians and nurses are only going to get worse with aging populations globally in many to most countries. Bedside manner sometimes does fall by the wayside.

• The study, published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, used data from Reddit’s AskDocs forum, in which members can post medical questions that are answered by verified healthcare professionals.

Key Points

Question:  Can an artificial intelligence chatbot assistant, provide responses to patient questions that are of comparable quality and empathy to those written by physicians?

Findings:  In this cross-sectional study of 195 randomly drawn patient questions from a social media forum, a team of licensed health care professionals compared physicians’ and chatbots’ responses to patient’s questions asked publicly on a public social media forum. The chatbot responses were preferred over physician responses and rated significantly higher for both quality and empathy.

Meaning:  These results suggest that artificial intelligence assistants may be able to aid in drafting responses to patient questions.

• You can find many “expert” reactions to this paper here.

They do not reflect very favorably on the study or ChatGPT I should note.

• r/AskDocs is a subreddit with approximately 452,000 members who post medical questions and verified healthcare professionals submit answers. While anyone can respond to a question, moderators verify healthcare professionals' credentials and responses display the respondent's level of credentials. The result is a large and diverse set of patient medical questions and accompanying answers from licensed medical professionals.

Let’s think about this a bit more deeply.