Geoff Brumfiel
NPR.org - Health Shots
Originally posted 5 APR 23
Here are two excerpts:
But Paul kept getting pinged from younger doctors and medical students. They were using ChatGPT, and saying it was pretty good at answering clinical questions. Then the users of his software started asking about it.
In general, doctors should not be using ChatGPT by itself to practice medicine, warns Marc Succi, a doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital who has conducted evaluations of how the chatbot performs at diagnosing patients. When presented with hypothetical cases, he says, ChatGPT could produce a correct diagnosis accurately at close to the level of a third- or fourth-year medical student. Still, he adds, the program can also hallucinate findings and fabricate sources.
"I would express considerable caution using this in a clinical scenario for any reason, at the current stage," he says.
But Paul believed the underlying technology can be turned into a powerful engine for medicine. Paul and his colleagues have created a program called "Glass AI" based off of ChatGPT. A doctor tells the Glass AI chatbot about a patient, and it can suggest a list of possible diagnoses and a treatment plan. Rather than working from the raw ChatGPT information base, the Glass AI system uses a virtual medical textbook written by humans as its main source of facts – something Paul says makes the system safer and more reliable.
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Nabla, which he co-founded, is now testing a system that can, in real time, listen to a conversation between a doctor and a patient and provide a summary of what the two said to one another. Doctors inform their patients that the system is being used in advance, and as a privacy measure, it doesn't actually record the conversation.
"It shows a report, and then the doctor will validate with one click, and 99% of the time it's right and it works," he says.
The summary can be uploaded to a hospital records system, saving the doctor valuable time.
Other companies are pursuing a similar approach. In late March, Nuance Communications, a subsidiary of Microsoft, announced that it would be rolling out its own AI service designed to streamline note-taking using the latest version of ChatGPT, GPT-4. The company says it will showcase its software later this month.
