Anthony Ademiluyi
Experts have urged stakeholders in the health sector and patients to embrace the recently launched artificial intelligence invention – Chat GPT, noting that it is poised to radically change healthcare delivery.
Chat GPT owned and developed by Artificial Intelligence research company, OpenAI, was launched as a prototype on November 30, 2022. It is an intelligent chatbot that helps automate chat tasks.
While Chat GPT’s factual accuracy, however, has been questioned, it has continued to attract interest because of its detailed answers across many sectors of knowledge.
The health experts stated that the wind of change from artificial intelligence blowing across different sectors will also impact the health sector, urging stakeholders in the sector to begin to embrace the reality.
The experts stressed that Chat GPT will provide adjunct and complementary services in the healthcare sector.
While acknowledging the possibility of job losses in the healthcare sector as the influence of artificial intelligence like the Chat GPT grows, the experts said that physicians will continue to play an important role in healthcare, noting that they cannot be replaced by AI.
Speaking with Reportr Door HealthWise, the experts, Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Texas, Dr. Oyetokunbo Ibidapo-Obe, and CEO and Co-Founder, Medispark, Ugochukwu Nwokoro acknowledged the incursion of artificial intelligence into the medical space and called for greater technical know-how on the part of the health regulatory authorities to effectively deal with the reality.
Speaking with our correspondent, Dr. Ibidapo-Obe said that Chat GPT helps enhance a lot of the processes in the health sector, adding that it can even help get a simple diagnosis done and minimise delays.
She said, “The areas that can be transformed by ChatGPT are basically all areas. Things as ordinary and mundane as scheduling appointments, processing test results & conveying the same in easily understandable non-medical terminologies. It does not replace the physician/medical practitioner. It is an adjunct to the attention/service of a healthcare professional since several things can go wrong if the system is misunderstood.
“AI can help to reduce the workload due to easy access to information since a lot of work is self-directed at the moment. For example, there’s no need for a real human cadaver as this can now be done on a 3d platform, but it also poses a challenge because it’s quite different from the real thing.”
On how the health regulatory environment should relate to Chat GPT and other AI tools, Dr. Ibidapo-Obe said while health regulatory authorities should be excited about the potential benefits of the invention, they should come up with guidelines to ensure no harm is done by it.
“The first reaction should be that of excitement as to the possibilities of the AI tool. It cannot replace the role of healthcare professionals but parameters should be set on how to use it or what it can do. Just as a knife can help a child cut his food, it can also cut the child’s hand. Regulatory bodies need to enhance the safety of its use to help the general public apply caution,” she said.
The physician dispelled the notion that there will be massive job losses in the health sector with the growing influence of artificial intelligence tools like Chat GPT but acknowledged that the invention will cause some changes to the way the sector operates.
She said, “It’s a double-edged sword. There’ll definitely be changes which will affect some jobs, but if well applied it can prompt people to look at getting more training & getting specialised”.
Dr. Ibidapo-Obe also noted that Chat GPT can help in the growth of the academia and health research industries.
She said the use of artificial intelligence for health-related research will be awesome as it would help ensure that information and data can be obtained faster, adding that analysis can also be done faster.
She also noted that artificial intelligence should be included in the medical school curriculum so that the students who are future medical practitioners can be knowledgeable about it even to an advanced stage, especially as it relates to healthcare services.
Also speaking with our correspondent, Nwokoro said that as currently designed, Chat GPT is far more useful on the patient-end, for simply asking questions about conditions just like Google Search but more straight to the point.
He disclosed that the inventor company of Chat GPT – OpenAi has just released a few application programming interfaces (APIs) that will allow developers to build products and interfaces layered on top of ChatGPT. That’s when we’ll see some interesting uses.
He said, “ChatGPT will make telemedicine a lot more human-like. I’ve seen prototypes of ChatGPT-based virtual assistants that can help with clinic appointment booking and arrangement of drug delivery to patients’ homes. Symptom-checking is another interesting use case. Right now, you can tell ChatGPT multiple symptoms you’re experiencing and it will suggest what is most likely wrong with you, which is effectively a diagnosis.
“Some symptom checkers, which were based on simpler algorithms, have already existed for a while but a ChatGPT-based checker would be far more accurate as it provides answers generated from its incredibly large sets of training data. Because of this, it can even go as far as recommending specific treatments or where to source them. But we must be cautious, ChatGPT is still ‘garbage in garbage out’ so it’s only as good as the information you give it. You could ask ChatGPT the same question framed in two different ways and it will give you two different answers.”
He, however, called for caution in the use of Chat GPT and other AI tools.
He said, “There will be quacks emerging – people who pose as medical professionals but don’t know anything except what ChatGPT tells them. Frankly, I don’t know how you could effectively regulate this. Medical licensing and regulation could help but in a place like Nigeria, where healthcare is already expensive, these bad actors may emerge as a cheaper option for most people.
“Also, as most ChatGPT-based healthcare tools will be online, governments may consider developing some kind of medical license for digital health platforms. Because AI technologies are in a rapid development stage, authorities would have to be open to rapidly iterating their policies as well.
“Lastly, patient data privacy and security are a major concern. There are already laws around this but they’ll need to be bolstered to face a potentially huge shift toward telehealth.”
Nwokoro, however, agreed that Chat GPT could lead to job losses in the health sector, urging professionals in the sector to be proactive.
He said, “Once digital health tools are well developed and artificial intelligence automation becomes prevalent, they could begin replacing the less-analytic and administrative roles in healthcare – clinical receptionists, healthcare billing officers, medical records staff, patient clerking assistants, etc. It is unlikely to replace doctors, but it will definitely make their jobs easier.”
He equally noted that ChatGPT will positively impact research in the health industry.
He said, “I’ve done a bit of research using ChatGPT. It’s a huge time saver more than anything else. You can easily discover and summarise academic sources on very specific subjects with it by simply asking a question like ‘Summarise the findings of the ten most popular research studies on the impact of telemedicine in Africa’ It will yield very useful results.
“You can also ask it to compare two specific articles or compare the opinions of two leading researchers in a field. This is way faster than Googling research topics and combing through endless pages of links that may end up being useless. However, it is impotent that you check and verify its references, as sometimes they could be inaccurate or fake. I think this is a great tool for medical students, not just researchers, as their learning speeds could be significantly improved.”
According to a study published online by News Medical Life Sciences, Chat GPT could be very useful for healthcare delivery.
Chat GPT, the study says can assist with clinical decision support by providing real-time, evidence-based recommendations such as flagging potential drug interactions, suggesting treatment options for a specific condition, and providing relevant clinical guidelines.
The study stated further that medical record keeping is another area where ChatGPT will likely improve healthcare systems, noting that it could summarise patient medical histories, effectively streamlining the record-keeping process.
“Theoretically, healthcare professionals could dictate to ChatGPT, which could automatically summarise the key details.
Real-time translation is another function of ChatGPT that can be leveraged in healthcare. The system’s advanced language processing capabilities could be capitalised on to quickly and accurately translate technical terms and medical jargon, ensuring patients fully understand their diagnosis, treatment options, and medical instructions,” the study says.
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