Clinical Trial Indicates A.I. Chatbots Could Aid Urgent Care
Nearly 100 patients discussed their maladies with a Google bot, called AMIE, before meeting with physicians.
Nearly 100 patients discussed their maladies with a Google bot, called AMIE, before meeting with physicians.
Last year, nearly 100 people tried a new form of medical care at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. After scheduling a visit with the hospital’s urgent care facility, they discussed their ailments with a Google chatbot before meeting with their doctors.
The bot explored their symptoms, the possible causes of their maladies and the potential treatments, before generating a summary of each conversation. Doctors could then review the bot’s summary in preparation for a patient’s visit.
These patients were part of an eight-month clinical trial that explored whether this specialized chatbot could assist primary care physicians without providing misleading or otherwise harmful information.
In the first-of-its-kind study, published on Thursday in the medical journal The Lancet, the hospital’s primary care physicians said that the bot was helpful in about 75 percent of patient cases, and that the technology may have changed the way they handled more than half of those cases. “They compared it to a high-performing medical student or resident,” said Peter Brodeur, a resident physician at Beth Israel.
The study also found that the bot had “hallucinated” — made stuff up — only once during hundreds of conversations. Generally, patients said they trusted the bot, but only because it was operating alongside trained physicians.
“None of our patients trusted it until they realized that it was handing-off their doctor,” said Adam Rodman, a Beth Israel internist and medical historian who helped conduct the trial.
