Dr. Google has dominated patient searches for years, but as augmented intelligence (AI) chatbots become the dominant online go-to, patients have more powerful tools at their disposal.
Google provided patients links to articles or websites, but Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT and other AI large-language model chatbots are a Dr. Google on steroids. They can give patients a summary that sounds like a medical professional talking to them and often providing them with seemingly authoritative answers to their queries.
Sometimes physicians can become frustrated when patients come in and question the recommendations the doctor gives them because AI chatbots—which cannot account for all the variables of a given patient’s situation and are prone to routine errors and so-called hallucinations—told them something different.
AI should not be a patient’s physician. But experts say that there are ways that patients can use AI chatbots so that they are helpful to them and their doctors. Below are four question patients can tailor with things such as their own age, gender and other pertinent information to ask AI chatbots before their primary care visit so that they can optimize their time with the physician.
I have an upcoming annual physical, what are five questions I should ask my doctor to get the most out of my appointment? Don’t underestimate stage fright, says Christopher Khoury, a digital health expert and the AMA’s vice president of strategic insights. Patients typically have limited time with their physician in the exam room, and it’s easy to forget what to ask in the moment. An AI chatbot can be a good way to help think through the questions you need to ask in a format you can bring with you.
I am experiencing these symptoms—or I am going in for my annual physical. Can you tell me what questions my physician may ask me so that I can prepare now and give the most complete answers possible? Knowing what questions they may be asked at an annual doctor’s visit gives the patient time to start thinking about the answers so they can provide more thoughtful responses and have a greater chance of not leaving the exam room wishing they would have added something to the conversation that they didn’t think of in the moment.
Further, by telling an AI chatbot some symptoms they are experiencing—pains, digestive issues, etc.—the tool can generate questions the physician may ask specific to that concern so that a patient can consider or even track before they step foot into the physician’s office. For example, for digestive issues the doctor may ask whether the severity or the pattern changed over time. Are there any changes in the frequency, consistency or color of your stool?
Can you create a symptom tracker for me that I can then share with my physician? This allows patients to bring even more detailed information about their symptoms to their doctor. For example, the patient can ask a chatbot to create a spreadsheet that allows them to track symptoms related to their digestive issues, including the ability to track where the pain is located along the digestive tract, how severe the pain was and what time of day it was when one experienced the pain They could also track what time one had a bowel movement and what the stool looked like.
Here is data from my wearable device. Is there anything my physician should know based on the data? Many patients wear devices that track resting heart rate and other health data that may or may not indicate a medical concern.
“As long as you are not using it to do anything more than say ‘Is there anything here that I should be concerned about?’ or ‘Anything my doctor might want to know?’ or ‘Any questions that I might want to ask my doctor based on this?’ I think that is reasonable,” said Robert M. Wachter, MD, an AMA member and author of the recently released book, A Giant Leap: How AI Is Transforming Healthcare and What That Means for Our Future.
Asking AI chatbots “to play doctor based on the data, at least the experience so far, has been a little sobering. It’s not quite good enough yet to give the right opinions.”
Carefully tailor your questions
For any of these questions, patients need to include some information about themselves to help ensure the questions are best suited for their personal needs. For example, providing the AI chatbot with your age, gender and any underlying health conditions in your prompt goes a long way in changing how it may answer the question.
“If you put into a tool ‘I’m short of breath’ and it knows nothing about you, it probably gives you a different answer than if you say ‘I have a history of blood clots,’ or if you say ‘I have diabetes,’ or if you say ‘I’m taking so-and-so medicine,’” said Dr. Wachter, who chairs the medicine department at the University of California, San Francisco. “The AI will do better the more it knows your context.”
But patients need to be careful that they don’t give AI chatbots too much personal information. As the AMA cautions in its guidance on how to use AI chatbots safely and efficiently, patients should not tell AI personal or identifying details because it is not guided by the same privacy guidelines as physicians’ offices.
From AI implementation to digital health adoption and EHR usability, the AMA is fighting to make technology work for physicians, ensuring that it is an asset to doctors. That includes recently launching the AMA Center for Digital Health and AI to give physicians a powerful voice in shaping how AI and other digital tools are harnessed to improve the patient and clinician experience.
