AI + Doctors => Better Healthcare!?

“Patient #101 — Please be ready now. Your AI doctor will speak to you shortly.”

This is not a message from the future. It is very much about to happen.

Many patients in California and Wisconsin states of the USA are now being greeted by AI chatbots at major hospitals. More specifically, ChatGPT of OpenAI is being used to reading patient messages and draft responses from their doctors.

This is part of an experimental effort to see if AI can bring down the time doctors spend on reading patients’ online messages and queries.

Early indicators show that AI-generated responses are needing human interventions & edits in general. Doctors feel the ‘human touch’ in the mail responses is missing and need to be put in. However, the response rate seems to have improved with AI assisting doctors.

From 2020 to 2023, the number of people consulting online has almost doubled in the USA alone, putting enormous pressure on medical professionals. A hospital system had patient messages jump from 50,000 messages a month before the pandemic, to over 80,000 a month after, with more than 140,000 messages in some pandemic months.

With this experiment, the AI is going through the past medical records of the patient, and their current query and prepares a draft response for the doctor, which he/she can edit and send back to the patient.

The idea of the experiment is to reduce the burnout of doctors. If the AI-generated responses need too much fact-checking or edits, it can only add to the burden of the doctor. Otherwise, it will be a much-welcome part of our journey to the future of co-existence with AI.

Anyway, it is projected that the telehealth market is only going to increase in the future. So, such measures are definitely a welcome step in the right direction.