The Future of ChatGPT in Health Care 🤖
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The Future of ChatGPT in Health Care 🤖
Three user tips, how I use ChatGPT myself & the future of psychiatry
Hey there,
ChatGPT is an advanced chatbot by OpenAI. What role can this technology play in health care? Read more in this newsletter.
I also share tips about a book about Generative AI, a productivity tool, and the series The Last of Us.
Happy reading!
–Peter Joosten
PS. If you can understand Dutch, this is my podcast about these topics.
ChatGPT in Health Care
What role does ChatGPT have in the consulting room of the psychiatrist of the future? A few weeks ago, I gave an interactive lecture on the future of psychiatry for psychiatrists at the Erasmus MC in Rotterdam.
Since then I have received many questions about this subject, including from physiotherapists, pediatricians, dietitians and administrators of nursing and care homes.
I will therefore be working on this theme more in the coming months. A few initial insights in this newsletter.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is an advanced chatbot developed by the American company OpenAI. GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. This means that the chatbot generates new texts based on training data.
Using statistical algorithms and neural networks, it calculates patterns, relationships and data in large data sets. This in turn forms the basis for generating new unique creations. That’s why this form of artificial intelligence is called Generative AI.
ChatGPT is designed to understand human language. As a user, you can type sentences into the chatbot, which ChatGPT responds to in normal sentences.
This is how I use ChatGPT
Does it still sound vague? These are a few examples of how I use ChatGPT as a sparring partner:
‘Imagine: you are an experienced facilitator of workshops in the pharmaceutical industry. A company asks you to give a workshop on integrity and ethics. What are cases that the participants can work on in groups?’
‘I am going to write an article about the role of generative AI for civil servants in a medium-sized municipality in the Netherlands. What are concrete applications I can use?’
‘Can you make a text in two paragraphs about a workshop in which the participants learn to become more future proof?’ … ‘In the workshop I want to focus on behavior & storytelling to become more future proof. Can you write a new suggestion?’ … ‘What would be a good title for this workshop?’
If you have a nice example of how you use ChatGPT, comment below this newsletter or send me a reply!
Examples in health care
The expectations surrounding ChatGPT and similar tools are high, especially when it comes to applications in health care.
For example, Robert Pearl, a professor at Stanford Medical School, says in an article on Wired:
ChatGPT is becoming more important than the stethoscope for doctors.
Some initial results are therefore impressive. For example, ChatGPT passes medical exams in the United States. Just like their competitor Med-PaLM from Google and Deep Mind. For that reason, EHR supplier Epic wants to integrate ChatGPT's underlying model, GPT-4, into its software.
Tips for healtch care professionals
In practical terms, how can your doctor, nurse or other health care professional experiment with this technology? A few ideas from recent assignments I did:
Ask for ideas. For example: ‘As manager of the Pediatrics department, I want to make a plan to increase the quality of care and reduce costs. Can you make a list of five suggestions for me to think of?’
Give it a role. For example: ‘You are an oncologist with a lot of empathy and an eye for the patient. How would you tell the patient that her tumor is not gone yet?’
Use it for sparring. For example: ‘What kind of treatment do you recommend for a patient with high blood pressure? Preferably no medication, but an intervention in lifestyle.’ ... ‘Thanks. What tips do you have to help the patient exercise more?’
If you have a nice example of how you use ChatGPT in health care, comment below on this newsletter or send a reply!
Future
In the lecture with the psychiatrists, we also discussed in detail the disadvantages of this technology. A few examples:
It is unclear on which datasets ChatGPT has been trained, but it probably contains significant biases.
What happens to the information you enter into the chatbot yourself? Especially for medical professionals, it is important to be careful with privacy-sensitive information.
Generative AI can cause a huge increase in disinformation. What are the consequences for your profession, for example as a doctor?
Apart from these risks, I think it’s great that the psychiatrists were open to learning more about this and discussing it with each other. For example, we discussed the question: what role will ChatGPT have in the psychiatrist’s office in the future?
ChatGPT itself gave this answer:
As a linguistic model, I can’t play a direct role in a psychiatrist’s office.
Want to know more?
In the upcoming period I will continue to work on this subject in my lectures, workshops and articles. If you want to talk about this or book me as a speaker, please contact me!
This is a video in Dutch about ChatGPT in healthcare (17 minutes):
📺 Media & Tech tips
Interesting articles, books, podcasts, videos, documentaries I recommend to check out!
1. BOOK / What is Generative AI? What are the consequences of media manipulation and disinformation on trust? How is our contact if we can present ourselves very differently in virtual worlds with an avatar or skin?
In the book Real Fake, these are the questions that the authors Menno van Doorn, Thijs Pepping and Sander Duivestein try to answer. A nice book that navigates between accessible examples and tougher (media) theories and philosophies.
2. TOOL / The Alfred program (for Mac) is indispensable for me. It makes me a lot more productive and saves me hours a week. With a keyboard shortcut I can quickly look for notes, find an email immediately or search for a document in Google Drive.
3. SERIES / The series The Last of Us (8.9 on IMDb) is based on the computer game with the same name. The story is about surviving in a desolate world with infected zombies. Sounds familiar, but make no mistake about the clichéd theme.
This makes the series great: lots of tension, spectacular images, great actors (Ok, Pedro Pascal, but especially Bella Ramsey) and an amazing ending (which Susan and I talked about for a long time).
🙏 Thank you for reading
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