A recent study published in JAMA Internal Medicine compared responses generated from AI-based chatbots to those of physicians in answering patient questions, and found that the chatbot responses were often superior in both quality and empathy. Out of 195 patient questions and responses, evaluators preferred chatbot responses in 78.6% of the 585 evaluations. The study suggests that chatbots could be used as an aid to physicians rather than a replacement. The COVID-19 pandemic expedited the implementation of virtual healthcare, leading to increased messaging volume and potential burnout for clinicians. While Google's chatbot Med-PaLM 2 has shown improvements in answering medical exam questions, it still needs further improvement to handle more complex medical reasoning questions.
Full article is from Fierce Healthcare here.