Consumers increasingly are turning to artificial intelligence to help them navigate an often confusing U.S. healthcare system.
“For both patients and providers in the United States, ChatGPT has become an important ally, helping people navigate the healthcare system, enabling them to self-advocate and supporting both patients and providers for better health outcomes,” according to a new report from OpenAI.
In general, three in five U.S. adults say they have used AI tools for their health or healthcare in the past three months. They are using AI to find information when they first feel sick, consulting it to prepare for visits with their clinicians and using it to better comprehend patient instructions and recommendations. They are also using it to deal with the administrative aftermath of billing, claims and denials.
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ChatGPT has become an especially important source of information for people living far from care or just needing health information after hours. About one in five Americans lives in a rural area, where populations skew older and face higher burdens of preventable disease and premature death. ChatGPT averaged more than 580,000 healthcare-related messages per week from people in these areas during a four-week timespan late last year.
It’s not just patients who are relying on AI. More than 20% of U.S. healthcare workers—including administrators, medical librarians, nurses and pharmacists—report using generative AI at least once a week at work. Medical librarians have the highest rates of weekly AI use at 53%, followed by nurses (46%), administrators (43%) and pharmacists (41%).
The report recommends several policy measures to help maximize the value of AI in healthcare:
- Open and securely connect the world’s medical data to speed up scientific discovery. Curing diseases increasingly depends on AI systems learning from large, diverse medical datasets, including genomics, medical imaging, clinical outcomes and real-world evidence.
- Build infrastructure to solve healthcare’s hardest problems and rapidly scale solutions. AI can help produce promising drugs, diagnostics and treatment strategies far faster than traditional research, but turning these ideas into real therapies still depends on physical infrastructure.
- Support workers’ transition into the healthcare professions that will be created and expanded by AI. AI-accelerated healthcare reshapes how work is done across research, clinical care and medical operations, creating new roles and expanding existing ones.
- Clarify the regulatory pathway for AI medical devices for consumer use. AI medical devices have the capacity to address a broad range of medical issues for consumers, but as the FDA has acknowledged, the current medical device regulatory framework was not designed for AI.
- Clarify the scope of medical device regulation to encourage innovation of AI services that support doctors. Currently, the FDA regulates as medical devices certain tools intended for use by physicians in their decision-making, and some of these tools are exempted by the 21st Century Cures Act, which predates AI solutions that can benefit providers today.
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