Report from OpenAI Claims ChatGPT Is Becoming an Important Complement to U.S. Healthcare

OpenAI just released a report about healthcare drawn from anonymized chatbot conversations. The title could double as one of those depressing single-sentence short stories: “AI as a Healthcare Ally: How Americans are navigating the system with ChatGPT.”

According to the report, OpenAI’s hallucinating application—a product psychologists claim has the potential to exacerbate or otherwise mishandle mental health symptoms—is being used by Americans in the following ways:

• Almost 2 million messages every week involve people trying to deal with medical pricing, claims (presumably on both the patient side and the insurance company side), insurance plans, billing, eligibility, coverage, and other stressful sounding issues related to private health insurance.
• 600,000 healthcare messages every week are sent from rural areas and other healthcare deserts.
• Seven out of ten healthcare queries occur during times when clinics are generally closed, “underscoring how people are seeking actionable information when facilities are closed,” the report says (and this could easily be true, but it may also underscore how often hypochondriacs and other people with anxiety disorders turn to ChatGPT when they’re up late and night worrying).

The report also says OpenAI itself conducted a survey (the methodology of which isn’t mentioned) finding that three in five U.S. adults self-report using AI tools in one of these ways at some point in the past three months.

Incidentally, a Gallup report from November of last year found that 30% of Americans answered “yes” to the question “Has there been a time in the last 12 months when […] You chose not to have a medical procedure, lab test or other evaluation that a doctor recommended to you because you didn’t have enough money to pay for it?” 

The OpenAI report highlights the story of a busy rural doctor who uses OpenAI models “as an AI scribe, drafting visit notes within the clinical workflow.” It goes on to say that AI models “make a near-term contribution by helping people in
underserved areas interpret information, prepare for care, and navigate gaps in access, while helping rare clinicians reclaim time and reduce burnout.”

I’m not sure which thought is bleaker: more and more people using chatbots as doctors because they can’t afford proper care, or people turning to doctors, and having the experience mediated through AI models.