Comparing Physician and Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Responses to Patient Questions Posted to a Public Social Media Forum

🤖 Plain-English Summary

Importance: The rapid expansion of virtual health care has caused a surge in patient messages concomitant with more work and burnout among health care professionals. Further exploration of this technology is warranted in clinical settings, such as using chatbot to draft responses that physicians could then edit.

🔑 Key Findings

• Artificial intelligence (AI) assistants could potentially aid in creating answers to patient questions by drafting responses that could be reviewed by clinicians.
• Objective: To evaluate the ability of an AI chatbot assistant (ChatGPT), released in November 2022, to provide quality and empathetic responses to patient questions.
• Design, Setting, and Participants: In this cross-sectional study, a public and nonidentifiable database of questions from a public social media forum (Reddit's r/AskDocs) was used to randomly draw 195 exchanges from October 2022 where a verified physician responded to a public question.

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