How Will AI Tools Like ChatGPT Change Healthcare?

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become more reality than fiction in recent months, with big implications for the future of medicine and health care. Osmosis Medical Education Fellows (OMEF) Sameer Ahmed Mughal and Andres Acevedo-Melo consider how AI and ChatGPT can be used to help physicians diagnose tough cases, track everyday patient care, and develop individualized medications, as well as pondering the current challenges and limitations of using AI in today’s Osmosis blog.

Introduction

ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) tool developed by technology company OpenAI, attracted over 173 million users within just five months of its initial release in November of 2022. This powerful tool swiftly extracts relevant information from the millions of files posted on the Internet and generates meaningful text based on what it finds, saving users valuable time and effort. 

Due to the incredible potential of ChatGPT, some concerns have been raised about the possibility of AI replacing doctors and reshaping the medical field. Let’s explore the benefits and challenges of AI, as well as the impact of ChatGPT on health care, and examine its influence on medical education, patient care, and the role of medical professionals. 

AI in the Health Care System

AI, including chatbots like ChatGPT, holds significant potential for the medical field. It can help health professionals make a diagnosis, give pharmacological advice, and even help administrators create a workable on-call schedule. However, it’s crucial to recognize that AI should augment human knowledge rather than replace it. 

Let’s take a look at some ways that AI is bringing innovation to healthcare:

Prompts and Treatment Recommendations: Medical practitioners can use ChatGPT's prompt functionality to generate a list of potential treatments based on a patient's symptoms and medical history. Mastering the art of ChatGPT prompts to extract accurate information from the internet is essential for obtaining precise and reliable medical insights.

Enhanced Medical Education: AI-powered tools can assist students by simplifying complex medical texts and making them easier to understand. This capability enables students to grasp intricate concepts more effectively, facilitating their learning process. Educators can also use AI to develop learning materials, create quizzes, check papers for plagiarism, and develop a course syllabus!

Streamlined Research Analysis: AI can analyze research papers and generate optimal conclusions, saving valuable time and effort for doctors and medical students. By automating this laborious task, AI allows healthcare professionals to allocate more time to patient care.

Empowering Patients: AI tools like ChatGPT can also directly benefit patients. With the creation of a chatbot, individuals can gain insights into their illnesses and receive advice, enabling them to make informed decisions about their health.

Reliability of Chatbots

While chatbots and other AI tools offer numerous advantages, their reliability is concerning. It’s important to acknowledge the limitations of chatbots, which are constrained by the algorithms on which they’re built. 

Here are some of the challenges:

Lack of Citations: Chatbots like ChatGPT don’t cite references for the knowledge they provide. This absence of citations raises questions about the reliability, feasibility, and pragmatism of the information they deliver. Relying solely on uncited knowledge may misguide patients, doctors, and medical students, potentially endangering lives.

Emotional and Psychological Support: Treating patients requires not only medical knowledge but also psychological and emotional support. Overreliance on AI tools for medical information overlooks the fundamental need for patients to be heard, comforted, and treated holistically. Placing the last step first disrupts the practical and ethical aspects of patient care.

Limiting Diversity of Thought and Practice: AI tools can be seen as "programmed indoctrinating tools" as they may limit the diversity of thought and practice in the medical field. Such limitations could hinder opportunities for innovation and improvement in health care practices.

5 Innovations Brought by AI Tools to Healthcare

AI is completely re-designing the healthcare system; here are five examples to support this statement:

AI-driven analysis of medical records: AI tools can efficiently manage data, and their algorithmic structure favors this ability. They can collect, classify, and trace large data sets available in medical information.

AI-informed therapeutic regimens: AI tools can analyze data sets and combine therapeutic regimens with the attributes of a patient’s symptoms, opening the gates of possible treatment plans.

AI-guided personalized medicine: Historically, drugs and treatments are developed based on the average person's needs because researchers are encouraged to make decisions that help the most people and provide the most significant possible return on investment. Because AI tools can access and report on large amounts of data, drugs and treatments can shift from a one-size-fits-all approach to an approach uniquely tailored to an individual's needs.

AI-enabled drug evolution: Pharmaceutical companies can take over a decade to create a drug, and the development costs as much as a billion dollars. The limitations lie in clinical trials and the inability to handle vast data sets. AI tools can speed up the process and make it more cost-effective, enabling innovations to occur more quickly.

Health assistance and medication management: Webcams, smartphones, and AI can help providers confirm that their patients are taking care of themselves (e.g., taking medications at the proper time and keeping an eye on their overall health). This tool would be extremely useful in the development of clinical trials, and its use supports beneficial outcomes.

Conclusion

ChatGPT and AI have the potential to optimize healthcare outcomes when used appropriately. By understanding the limitations and harnessing the benefits of AI, healthcare professionals can embrace innovation while upholding the essential aspects of patient care. The future of healthcare can be shaped for the betterment of all through the synergy of human expertise and AI tools.

About the Authors

Sameer Ahmed Mughal is a second year medical student at Services institute of Medical sciences, Lahore, Pakistan. He loves to journal his life and amidst this, he writes about things that inspire him. Sameer aims to be a Pathologist in the future and serve his country with the polished skill set he will acquire from his mentors.

Andres Acevedo-Melo is a second year internal medicine postgraduate student at University El Bosque in Bogotá, Colombia. He is originally from the same city. In the future, he is looking forward to continuing his studies in cancer care and blood diseases.