This week, electronic health record giant Epic unveiled a bevy of new bots designed to help patients understand their health and support doctors and administrators by automating some of their routine, lower-level tasks.
Dr. Chris Longhurst, chief medical and digital officer at UC San Diego Health, told Ruth he sees a lot of potential in Emmie, Epic’s artificial intelligence chatbot that can answer patients’ questions about their test results uploaded in Epic’s proprietary health record mobile app, MyChart.
“It’s going to be a game changer,” he said.
Longhurst conducted a clinical trial, which was approved by a committee that ensures human subjects are treated ethically, where 150 patients chatted with Emmie about their medical results. The study will be submitted for peer review and publication in a journal, but he said preliminary results were positive. Notably, he said, people seemed to like Emmie.
He also said people with less education tended to rate their experience with Emmie more highly than their more educated peers.
Why it matters: Studies suggest that people with college degrees live healthier, longer lives compared to those without a high school diploma. Health disparities have existed along social lines for decades and efforts to give Americans with less education better access to health care have historically been difficult.
While Emmie might not be able to connect patients with more care, Longhurst said the bot can go a long way toward helping less-educated patients understand their own health status and the care they receive.
“It may not bridge the digital divide, but it could bridge the medical divide,” he said.
Liability concerns: Despite Emmie’s capacity to engage patients, Longhurst thinks adoption will be slow partly because health systems have to carefully decide how they incorporate chatbots into patient care.
For example, how and where should health systems disclose to patients that they’re talking with a bot? Health systems must also thoroughly test Emmie to ensure the chatbot doesn’t serve up wrong information. They must also decide who’s liable if Emmie gives patients incorrect information.
Still, Longhurst thinks that in the long term having a chatbot explain medical results will become the standard of care: “If people are finding value out of pasting their [medical information] into ChatGPT, why wouldn’t they do that here?”
