Artificial intelligence could help triage emergency room patients, aiding providers during busy times, a new study found.
University of California, San Francisco researchers fed 10,000 pairs of deidentified ER visits into GPT-4, a large language model developed by OpenAI, asking the technology to identify which had the more severe condition, according to the May 7 JAMA Network Open study. The AI was correct 89% of the time.
Another 500-pair subset was evaluated by physicians as well as AI. The AI was right in 88% of cases, compared to 86% for physicians.
"Imagine two patients who need to be transported to the hospital but there is only one ambulance. Or a physician is on call and there are three people paging her at the same time, and she has to determine who to respond to first," said lead author Christopher Williams, MD, a postdoctoral scholar at UCSF's Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute, in a May 7 statement.
But he noted that AI isn't ready to be used in EDs until it's tested in clinical settings and biases are eliminated.
"It's great to show that AI can do cool stuff, but it's most important to consider who is being helped and who is being hindered by this technology," Dr. Williams stated. "Is just being able to do something the bar for using AI, or is it being able to do something well, for all types of patients?"