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

ABSTRACT:

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. 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

SUBMITTER: Ayers JW 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10148230 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature