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 a cross-sectional study evaluating 195 patient questions from a social media forum, AI chatbot responses were overwhelmingly preferred over physician responses, demonstrating significantly higher ratings in both quality and empathy.
Meaning: Artificial intelligence assistants could potentially play a pivotal role in framing responses to patient questions, reducing workload for health care professionals.
Introduction:
With the swift growth of virtual health care, there has been a marked increase in patient messages, leading to higher workload and increased burnout among health care professionals. The question arises: Could AI assistants help draft responses to these messages?
Objective:
This study aimed to assess the proficiency of an AI chatbot assistant, ChatGPT, introduced in November 2022, in delivering quality and empathetic responses to patient inquiries.
Methodology:
A cross-sectional design was employed, using a public and anonymous database of questions from a public social media forum (Reddit’s r/AskDocs). From this, 195 interactions from October 2022, involving a verified physician response to a public query, were randomly selected.
On December 22 and 23, 2022, these original questions were input into a fresh session with ChatGPT to generate chatbot responses. These responses, alongside the anonymized and randomly arranged physician replies, were assessed in triplicate by a group of licensed health care professionals. They determined "which response was superior" and evaluated both "the quality of information provided" and "the empathy or bedside manner provided."
Results:
The results were striking. Evaluators favored chatbot responses in 78.6% of the evaluations. On average, physician responses were considerably shorter than chatbot responses. Chatbot feedback was rated of considerably higher quality and empathy than physician responses. Specifically, the proportion of responses deemed of good or very good quality was notably higher for the chatbot. Likewise, chatbot responses were perceived to be more empathetic.
Conclusion:
The findings of this study highlight the potential of chatbots in delivering both quality and empathetic responses to patient questions on online forums. While this does not diminish the role of physicians, it does indicate the potential of such technology in clinical settings. AI chatbots could potentially assist in drafting responses, which physicians could then fine-tune. Future research, possibly in the form of randomized trials, could delve deeper into whether the utilization of AI assistants could enhance response quality, alleviate clinician burnout, and elevate patient outcomes.
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