Patients prefer EHR responses generated by artificial intelligence over answers from human clinicians, a new study found.
Here are seven things to know, per the Oct. 16 research letter in JAMA Network Open:
1. Researchers affiliated with Stanford (Calif.) Medicine surveyed 30 people on their satisfaction with messages written by both real-life clinicians and a large language model developed by Stanford.
2. The AI-generated responses received higher satisfaction scores, both overall and per specialty.
3. Cardiology-related answers generated by AI garnered the highest satisfaction.
4. Endocrinology responses from AI earned the highest marks for information quality and empathy.
5. Clinician message length was shorter and, unlike AI, associated with patient satisfaction, indicating that patients may not like "extreme brevity."
6. This was the first known study to address patient satisfaction with AI-generated EHR responses.
7. Future studies could analyze different types of regions, medical centers and study populations and include a larger sample size, the researchers said.