At a time when digitalization is increasingly becoming part of our everyday lives, artificial intelligence (AI) is also playing an ever more important role. In the healthcare sector in particular, AI is opening up completely new opportunities from which both healthcare professionals and patients can benefit. An exciting example of the use of AI is the text-based AI chatbot“ChatGPT“, which was developed by OpenAI. In this article, I will provide an overview of the functions of ChatGPT, focusing primarily on the potential and challenges of using it in hospitals, doctors’ surgeries and other healthcare facilities.

Basics: AI and ChatGPT

Before I delve deeper into the topic of ChatGPT and its potential applications in the healthcare industry, it is important to establish a basic understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) and its sub-disciplines – machine learning and deep learning. Artificial intelligence generally refers to systems or machines that can emulate human-like intelligence. This involves, for example, recognizing language, making decisions or solving problems that normally require human thought.

Machine learning is a special field of AI and refers to systems that have the ability to learn from experience and improve themselves without being explicitly programmed. A well-known example of this is email filtering, which learns to recognize spam messages better the more it is confronted with them.

Deep learning goes one step further. It is a sub-branch of machine learning and imitates the human brain with so-called artificial neural networks. This enables machines to recognize complex patterns in large amounts of data. A simple example of this could be facial recognition software that “learns” to identify certain faces in a crowd.

And now comes ChatGPT. ChatGPT is an example of an AI chatbot based on deep learning. It uses a technology called GPT (Generative Pretrained Transformer) to generate human-like texts. Through training on millions of Internet texts, ChatGPT has learned to communicate in natural language and respond to a variety of prompts. The key advantage of ChatGPT and similar chatbots is that they are available around the clock and can process a large number of requests simultaneously. They therefore offer enormous potential for use in the healthcare sector, from patient care to medical information searches.

I explained the question “What is ChatGPT?” in more detail in one of my last posts.

How does ChatGPT work?

ChatGPT is, as explained above, an AI model that was developed to have human-like conversations with humans. It is based on the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) architecture from OpenAI. GPT works by analyzing large amounts of text data and recognizing patterns. It learns by using these patterns to make predictions about the next word or phrase in a text.

ChatGPT uses its ability to understand natural language to analyze the user’s input and generate an appropriate response based on it. It takes into account the context of the previous messages and attempts to provide a meaningful and relevant response.

The result is an advanced chatbot that offers users a seamless and interactive experience, simulating human-like conversations.

ChatGPT in practice

In practice, ChatGPT offers a wide range of applications in various industries, from customer service to education, and is increasingly playing a significant role in the healthcare industry. In customer service, for example, chatbots such as ChatGPT can respond to customer inquiries around the clock, thereby increasing efficiency. An example of this is shown in the article with the Helvetia Insurance experiment. Here, ChatGPT’s language model was combined with information from the company’s website and the result is a chatbot that can answer the majority of the insurance company’s customer queries. In the education sector, ChatGPT can help students research information or understand complicated concepts. Teachers can also use ChatGPT to get inspiration for exam tasks and other lesson content.

In the healthcare industry, chatbots like ChatGPT can perform a variety of tasks, from automatically answering common patient queries to providing health information. They could even help triage patient requests by collecting and analyzing information to assess the severity of symptoms. Chatbots with ChatGPT can relieve medical staff and help to reduce waiting times for patients. In addition, chatbots can help to improve the flow of information between medical staff and patients and even play a role in telemedicine. In the following paragraph, I will show you some concrete examples of chatbots and ChatGPT in hospitals or doctors’ surgeries. However, it is extremely important to note that despite the many possible applications of ChatGPT in the healthcare industry, it is not a replacement for medical staff, but rather serves as a supplement and support.

Application examples of ChatGPT in the healthcare industry

Patient communication

Chatbots that use the ChatGPT language model can create very natural-sounding dialogs and respond to a wide range of questions. This is shown by the Helvetia Insurance chatbot. Such a chatbot can also serve as the first point of contact for patients and their relatives in a hospital or doctor’s surgery by answering basic questions about health or providing information about treatments. It can also be used to arrange appointments, reducing the administrative burden on medical staff. It is important to note that these types of chatbots, which are mostly based on knowledge from the website or other documents, are very easy and inexpensive for companies to implement.

Health education

A chatbot such as ChatGPT can also be used for health education by providing easy-to-understand information about various diseases, treatments or healthy lifestyles. The chatbot with ChatGPT generally offers 4 advantages:

• The chatbot is available around the clock and interested people do not have to wait.
• The chatbot takes the strain off employees as it can answer many questions independently.
• ChatGPT has the possibility to adapt its tonality exactly to that of the user. The chatbot can therefore communicate “at eye level”.
• There are patients who are reluctant to see a doctor about shameful issues. Studies show that anonymous communication with a chatbot is sometimes more successful.

Support for medical staff

ChatGPT can serve as a “virtual assistant” for medical staff by helping to collect patient data, document symptoms or summarize the latest medical research results. For example, employees can give the chatbot notes from a treatment and the chatbot will write a suitable text. Or the chatbot documents phone calls or similar. However, data protection and patient privacy must definitely be observed with this application. More on this at the end of this article.

Telemedicine

In times of social distancing and overburdened healthcare systems, ChatGPT could play an important role in telemedicine. Patients could report their symptoms via a chatbot such as ChatGPT, which then forwards the information to medical professionals. For example, ChatGPT can create initial summaries of the conversation or provide staff with suggestions for treatment based on historical data. Here, too, there are a few points to note regarding data protection.

Marketing and communication

Even if the patient is the first priority in a hospital, it is inevitable that employees from communications and marketing will deal with economic and marketing-related topics. ChatGPT can support the creation of social media posts or websites, for example. Prompt engineering plays a particularly important role in this application.

Symptom check and triage

If you ask ChatGPT himself how he envisages the chatbot being used in the healthcare sector, the idea of a “symptom checker” quickly comes to mind: “ChatGPT could help patients to analyze symptoms and assess the urgency of their medical situation. In this way, potentially critical cases could be prioritized and waiting times in emergency rooms could be reduced.” Personally, I consider this application to be very sensitive if it is used without human monitoring. The AI and ChatGPT are very good, but the systems can also make mistakes.

Challenges and concerns when using ChatGPT

Data protection and security aspects when using AI technologies

Of course, when using ChatGPT in the healthcare sector, there are also relevant aspects that need to be considered with regard to data protection and security. In general, all information that employees send to the ChatGPT chatbot is processed by the AI model and can also be used for further AI training purposes. It is therefore advisable not to exchange any sensitive or confidential data with the ChatGPT chatbot. You can ask ChatGPT to write a medical report on a treatment, but you should not share any data about the patient, but anonymize it beforehand. You can also find out more about data protection and ChatGPT in one of my last posts.

Incorrect answers from ChatGPT

The general chatbot ChatGPT is based on a wealth of knowledge from the Internet. Not all information is always correct. It is therefore possible that ChatGPT is using an incorrect knowledge source and is therefore producing an incorrect response. It is therefore important to critically scrutinize all ChatGPT results. If you create your own chatbot based on Generative AI (example: Helvetia), you can influence the accuracy of the content yourself. So if you have “good” sources of knowledge, the number of incorrect answers will be significantly lower.

Need for appropriate training and preparation of employees for the use of ChatGPT

To ensure that ChatGPT and AI are used correctly without violating ethical principles or legal rules, your employees need training. It is important that employees understand the opportunities and limitations of the tool and can then use it correctly in appropriate situations.

Conclusion: ChatGPT in the healthcare industry

I think the article shows how well AI and ChatGPT can also be used in the healthcare industry. It should be noted that we can either use the chatbot “ChatGPT” from OpenAI, or we can develop our own solutions with the help of ChatGPT’s language model. If we use ChatGPT from OpenAI, we must be aware that the data from OpenAI can still be used. It is therefore highly recommended NOT to enter any personal patient data into the chatbot.

And now?

Would you like to find out more about ChatGPT or even use AI in your company? Then let’s exchange ideas or maybe I can do a ChatGPT workshop with you?

The easiest way is to send me a short WhatsApp message or an e-mail. Then we can get to know each other and I can find out more about your needs and goals.

You can also find more information about my offer on the ChatGPT workshop page.

By the way, I also offer a ChatGPT Prompt list, especially for the healthcare industry.

Or are you interested in specific AI tools in your medical practice? Then take a look at my Fit with AI offer for the healthcare sector at.