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

TL;DR

ChatGPT can help improve patient education in emergency settings by answering questions and clarifying instructions, but it has limitations like misinformation risks and privacy issues.

Contribution

This paper explores ChatGPT's potential to enhance patient education in emergency care while highlighting its limitations and medicolegal concerns.

Findings

ChatGPT can assist with care-related questions and discharge instructions in emergency settings.

Limitations include misinformation risks, lack of input standardization, and privacy concerns.

Medicolegal liability remains a challenge when physicians use ChatGPT in clinical practice.

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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