{"id":407372,"date":"2026-01-13T23:08:09","date_gmt":"2026-01-13T23:08:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/407372\/"},"modified":"2026-01-13T23:08:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-13T23:08:09","slug":"doctors-think-ai-has-a-place-in-healthcare-but-maybe-not-as-a-chatbot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/407372\/","title":{"rendered":"Doctors think AI has a place in healthcare \u2014 but maybe not as a chatbot"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr. Sina Bari, a practicing surgeon and AI healthcare leader at data company iMerit<\/a>, has seen firsthand how ChatGPT can lead patients astray with faulty medical advice.<\/p>\n

\u201cI recently had a patient come in, and when I recommended a medication, they had a dialogue printed out from ChatGPT that said this medication has a 45% chance of pulmonary embolism,\u201d Dr. Bari told TechCrunch.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When Dr. Bari investigated further, he found that the statistic was from a paper about the impact of that medication in a niche subgroup of people with tuberculosis, which didn\u2019t apply to his patient.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And yet, when OpenAI announced its dedicated ChatGPT Health<\/a> chatbot last week, Dr. Bari felt more excitement than concern.<\/p>\n

ChatGPT Health, which will roll out in the coming weeks, allows users to talk to the chatbot about their health in a more private setting, where their messages won\u2019t be used as training data for the underlying AI model.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s great,\u201d Dr. Bari said. \u201cIt is something that\u2019s already happening, so formalizing it so as to protect patient information and put some safeguards around it [\u2026] is going to make it all the more powerful for patients to use.\u201d<\/p>\n

Users can get more personalized guidance from ChatGPT Health by uploading their medical records and syncing with apps like Apple Health and MyFitnessPal. For the security-minded, this raises immediate red flags.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Techcrunch event<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\u201cAll of a sudden there\u2019s medical data transferring from HIPAA-compliant organizations to non-HIPAA-compliant vendors,\u201d Itai Schwartz, co-founder of data loss prevention firm MIND, told TechCrunch. \u201cSo I\u2019m curious to see how the regulators would approach this.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the way some industry professionals see it, the cat is already out of the bag. Now, instead of Googling cold symptoms, people are talking to AI chatbots \u2014 over 230 million people<\/a> already talk to ChatGPT about their health each week.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was one of the biggest use cases of ChatGPT,\u201d Andrew Brackin, a partner at Gradient who invests in health tech, told TechCrunch. \u201cSo it makes a lot of sense that they would want to build a more kind of private, secure, optimized version of ChatGPT for these healthcare questions.\u201d<\/p>\n

AI chatbots have a persistent problem with hallucinations<\/a>, a particularly sensitive issue in healthcare. According to Vectara\u2019s Factual Consistency Evaluation Model<\/a>, OpenAI\u2019s GPT-5 is more prone to hallucinations than many Google and Anthropic models. But AI companies see the potential to rectify inefficiencies in the healthcare space (Anthropic<\/a> also announced a health product this week).<\/p>\n

For Dr. Nigam Shah, a professor of medicine at Stanford and chief data scientist for Stanford Health Care, the inability of American patients to access care is more urgent than the threat of ChatGPT dispensing poor advice.<\/p>\n

\u201cRight now, you go to any health system and you want to meet the primary care doctor \u2014 the wait time will be three to six months,\u201d Dr. Shah said. \u201cIf your choice is to wait six months for a real doctor, or talk to something that is not a doctor but can do some things for you, which would you pick?\u201d<\/p>\n

Dr. Shah thinks a clearer route to introduce AI into healthcare systems comes on the provider side, rather than the patient side.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Medical journals have often<\/a> reported<\/a> that administrative tasks can consume about half of a primary care physician\u2019s time, which slashes the number of patients they can see in a given day. If that kind of work could be automated, doctors would be able to see more patients, perhaps reducing the need for people to use tools like ChatGPT Health without additional input from a real doctor.<\/p>\n

Dr. Shah leads a team at Stanford that is developing ChatEHR<\/a>, a software that is built into the electronic health record (EHR) system, allowing clinicians to interact with a patient\u2019s medical records in a more streamlined, efficient manner.<\/p>\n

\u201cMaking the electronic medical record more user friendly means physicians can spend less time scouring every nook and cranny of it for the information they need,\u201d Dr. Sneha Jain, an early tester of ChatEHR, said in a Stanford Medicine article<\/a>. \u201cChatEHR can help them get that information up front so they can spend time on what matters \u2014 talking to patients and figuring out what\u2019s going on.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Anthropic is also working on AI products that can be used on the clinician and insurer sides, rather than just its public-facing Claude chatbot. This week, Anthropic announced Claude for Healthcare<\/a> by explaining how it could be used to reduce the time spent on tedious administrative tasks, like submitting prior authorization requests to insurance providers.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome of you see hundreds, thousands of these prior authorization cases a week,\u201d said Anthropic CPO Mike Krieger in a recent presentation at J.P. Morgan\u2019s Healthcare Conference<\/a>. \u201cSo imagine cutting 20, 30 minutes out of each of them \u2014 it\u2019s a dramatic time savings.\u201d<\/p>\n

As AI and medicine become more intertwined, there\u2019s an inescapable tension between the two worlds \u2014 a doctor\u2019s primary incentive is to help their patients, while tech companies are ultimately accountable to their shareholders, even if their intentions are noble.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think that tension is an important one,\u201d Dr. Bari said. \u201cPatients rely on us to be cynical and conservative in order to protect them.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dr. Sina Bari, a practicing surgeon and AI healthcare leader at data company iMerit, has seen firsthand how…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":407373,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1930,49,48,84,392,1058,278],"class_list":{"0":"post-407372","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-anthropic","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-health","12":"tag-healthcare","13":"tag-medicine","14":"tag-openai"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=407372"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407372\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/407373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=407372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=407372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=407372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}