ChatGPT is everywhere. Some praise it; others curse it. Yet, nobody can deny there are some potential applications to the technology in various industries, including healthcare. Respectively, ChatGPT telehealth might be the next essential solution to multiple issues the sector faces. With projected revenue of $1 billion by 2024, ignoring this technology is a significant mistake.
At this point, Gartner explores some notable ChatGPT use cases in research and development. Taking the case further, let’s analyze how the tool might benefit healthcare and discover its potential challenges.
What Is ChatGPT?
In a nutshell, ChatGPT is a next-level conversational tool tapping into what Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Deep Learning have to offer. Created by OpenAI, the tool is founded on the latest interaction of the GPT language model. The technology answers multiple inquiries, from writing narratives in the styles of prominent writers to fixing programming prompts. In such a case, ChatGPT may lead to the growing chatbot market (see Fig.1).
In addition to conversational opportunities, ChatGPT can be used for daily tasks automation and better data management. Keeping this in mind, let’s look at more healthcare-specific ChatGPT use cases to understand how the technology can change people’s thoughts about the industry.
8 ChatGPT’s Potential Uses In Healthcare
Technology brings AI closer to healthcare. The range of its industry-specific advantages may range from better decision-making to more capable telehealth. Yet, to understand the full scope of the subject matter, here are eight particular ChatGPT’s potential uses to bring healthcare to the next level.
1. Summarizing Patient Records
According to this article, ChatGPT got more than 1 million users in under a week. Thus, it can amass many user-patients and bring more patient data when used in healthcare. As a systemic patient analysis tool, healthcare professionals can use ChatGPT to summarize patient records. While tapping into AI and ML, it can be taught to become a physician’s digital assistant.
The technology can extract patient records, group them, and label them per specific categories, for instance, family history, lab results, medication, symptoms, and many more. That will grant physicians new access to patient information to make diagnosing more personalized.
2. Boosting Patient Education
After the COVID-19 pandemic, a higher number of patients value the importance of self-diagnosing. With ChatGPT, the matter of patient education can be redesigned completely. Physicians can use the tool’s simplified syntax to keep patients informed and knowledgeable. In most cases, the traditional perspective on patient data revolves around professional language – the one patients cannot understand. ChatGPT can change that.
The technology can bring intelligible health-related insights directly to patients when coupled with telehealth AI. In a broader scope, one can even have a medicine podcast with scripts and writing generated by ChatGPT. Healthcare professionals can use this approach to educate patients on pressing health-related topics, thus promoting different aspects of public health.
3. Addressing Patient Inquiries
As mentioned above, ChatGPT can serve as a chatbot when interacting with patients. One of the obvious ChatGPT use cases is all about answering FAQs. While medical professionals are exposed to a fast-paced working environment, they often need more time to deal with various simple patient inquiries. In such a case, ChatGPT can narrow down the gap in care information and provide answers to patients’ FAQs in a human-like manner.
Besides, the tool can engage in a systematic patient analysis when dealing with inquiries. It means ChatGPT can analyze patterns in patient inquiries and prioritize some most pressing topics while notifying physicians about what patients are most concerned about. To respond to inquiries, medical professionals can also use telemedicine ChatGPT to establish a direct and informative communication channel with multiple patients.
4. Better Chatbots and Virtual Assistants
At this moment, you might have noticed a direct connection between ChatGPT and telehealth. Both technologies can aid one another and bring a next-level patient experience. Telemedicine ChatGPT, which must be built following HIPAA standards, can become a new evolution of a standard chatbot and virtual assistant.
In short, telehealth AI ensures patient-machine interaction is conducted in a way people do not recognize they are communicating with software. In such a case, bringing ChatGPT to telehealth is a direct path toward improving workflows while elevating the patient experience.
People often use patient portals to deal with some mundane workflow-related aspects. Yet, with ChatGPT, these can be automated, thus making it unnecessary to have administrative staff handling these tasks. Besides, do not forget that ChatGPT can be as good as Amazon’s Alexa or Google Assistant by interacting with patients via different communication channels.
5. Handling Vast Volumes of Medical Data
Up to a point, we scratched only one particular aspect of digital healthcare with ChatGPT – patient interaction. However, let’s not forget that technology is a data processing tool that can help deal with a growing number of data out there (see Fig. 2).
Coupling ChatGPT with Big data tools is a great way to make sense of the vast amounts of raw medical data. The tool can help tap into this uncharted territory and find insights medical professionals can use for better diagnosing and treatment opportunities. Besides, when used correctly, the instrument can help deal with some healthcare data management problems.
6. Predictive Capabilities
When it comes to AI, ML, and RPA, there is one particular aspect in common – predictive capabilities. These stem from the fact that technologies above can process vast amounts of data and extract some evidence-based insights. At this point, digital healthcare with ChatGPT is another opportunity to tap into AI-based predictive analytics.
More specifically, a transformer model within ChatGPT can search through training data to locate certain patterns. Then, these insights can be used for medical summarization or for designing better treatment options. Predictive analytics brought by ChatGPT AI is a new way to anticipate the best treatment approaches for tackling a changing patient condition.
7. Personalized Treatment Plans
ChatGPT brings forward predictive capabilities allowing healthcare professionals to predict the best treatment methods for specific conditions. However, the technology can also be used to design personalized treatment plans. ChatGPT, an AI instance in healthcare, is a great way to bring personalization into service provision.
One can imagine medical professionals utilizing ChatGPT for systemic patient analysis, which means processing vast amounts of patient-related data and adopting it into predictive analytics patterns. In such a case, physicians will have a comprehensive picture of a patient’s medical history and condition. Equipped with these insights, one can make highly personalized patient-specific treatment decisions, thus improving the overall quality of service provision.
8. Relieving Daily Tasks
Finally, ChatGPT can make the life of administrative staff and medical professionals much more accessible. Digital healthcare with ChatGPT brings forward process automation. We illustrated one example above when the tool could handle FAQs instead of dedicated personnel. Yet, the scope of relieving various manual tasks is much broader.
To illustrate, ChatGPT can help healthcare professionals transcribe medical records and generate reports at a far greater pace. Besides, the technology can be trained to transcribe the entire patient medical record archives. All these aspects of automation grant medical professionals more time to focus on patient-related health inquiries.
ChatGPT Challenges Healthcare
ChatGPT is still in its germination stage, and a lot must be done to deal with the potential challenges it brings. Notably, it is an even more pressing matter in the context of the rising number of healthcare data breaches (see Fig. 3).
Keeping that in mind, these are some notable ChatGPT challenges to address:
- The current ChatGPT iteration relies on outdated data, which means the algorithms can process information up to 2021. That is a significant concern for healthcare, an industry heavily relying on accurate and up-to-date data.
- In most cases, the quality of responses ChatGPT offers depends on how well asking prompts are designed. In other words, if a patient does not know how to present a correct inquiry, one will get an incorrect response.
- Another limitation is again about prompts. The response might be biased if someone asks ChatGPT a biased question.
These are some notable ChatGPT challenges. These must be addressed to make the tool fully eligible to be used in healthcare. Besides, one should also expect when ChatGPT is brought into the medical field, it should be reconfigured per HIPAA and HIPAA-related regulations.
The Bottom Line
Telehealth ChatGPT might be the next big thing in healthcare. However, investing much time and effort is apparent to address the notable ChatGPT challenges above. If handled correctly, the list of healthcare-related ChatGPT use cases can go far beyond the eight potential applications mentioned above. After all, the companies recognizing the value of ChatGPT first are the ones getting a competitive edge first as well.
