Easing the Burden on Caregivers- Applications of Artificial Intelligence for Physicians and Caregivers of Children with Cleft Lip and Palate

Abstract

ObjectiveMany caregivers of children with cleft lip and palate experience a high level of anxiety throughout their child's medical and surgical care. We aim to evaluate artificial intelligence (AI) as a tool to mitigate these feelings and can aid clinicians in the development of robust pediatric educational materials for caregivers and families.DesignThirteen of the most common postoperative questions following cleft lip and/or palate repair were developed by an expert panel of senior Pediatric Plastic Surgeons and were posed to ChatGPT. Professional answers from the expert panel were provided and compared to responses from ChatGPT. A literature review was also conducted to generate a new support model for caregivers with children undergoing a surgical procedure.SettingDepartment of Pediatric Plastic Surgery at a metropolitan Children's Hospital.ParticipantsSenior Pediatric Plastic Surgeons at a metropolitan Children's Hospital.InterventionsNone.Main Outcome MeasureThe primary outcome was to determine the ability of ChatGPT to respond to common postoperative questions and to develop a model for AI assistance in family-centered perioperative care.ResultsChatGPT had a postoperative question response accuracy rate of 69% when compared with subject matter expert responses, with its greatest errors being information errors. An extensive literature search revealed that AI can assist in multiple traditional perioperative strategies to reduce caregivers and patient anxiety.ConclusionsArtificial Intelligence can help to reduce the burden of generating patient education materials as well as support caregivers in multiple aspects and perioperative care.

Keywords: artificial intelligence; cleft lip and palate; quality improvement.

Figure 1.

Schematic of the traditional perioperative support model versus our proposed AI-assisted model.