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. 2024 Sep;25(5):845-855.
doi: 10.5811/westjem.18650.

ChatGPT's Role in Improving Education Among Patients Seeking Emergency Medical Treatment

Faris F Halaseh  1 , Justin S Yang  1 , Clifford N Danza  1 , Rami Halaseh  2 , Lindsey Spiegelman  3
Affiliations

ChatGPT's Role in Improving Education Among Patients Seeking Emergency Medical Treatment

Faris F Halaseh et al. West J Emerg Med. 2024 Sep.

Abstract

Providing appropriate patient education during a medical encounter remains an important area for improvement across healthcare settings. Personalized resources can offer an impactful way to improve patient understanding and satisfaction during or after a healthcare visit. ChatGPT is a novel chatbot-computer program designed to simulate conversation with humans- that has the potential to assist with care-related questions, clarify discharge instructions, help triage medical problem urgency, and could potentially be used to improve patient-clinician communication. However, due to its training methodology, ChatGPT has inherent limitations, including technical restrictions, risk of misinformation, lack of input standardization, and privacy concerns. Medicolegal liability also remains an open question for physicians interacting with this technology. Nonetheless, careful utilization of ChatGPT in clinical medicine has the potential to supplement patient education in important ways.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflicts of Interest: By the WestJEM article submission agreement, all authors are required to disclose all affiliations, funding sources and financial or management relationships that could be perceived as potential sources of bias. No author has professional or financial relationships with any companies that are relevant to this study. There are no conflicts of interest or sources of funding to declare.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
(A–B) Selected Q&A relating to medical care. Inputs are human questions and outputs were generated by ChatGPT.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
(A–B). Selected questions relating to discharge instructions and ChatGPT output.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
(A–B). ChatGPT input and output. Top output demonstrates ChatGPT triage recommendations and bottom output signifies urgent response instructions.
Figure 4.
Figure 4.
ChatGPT responses in English (top) and Spanish (bottom).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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