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Why nurses liked an AI bot more than doctors did
An interesting research letter out in JAMA Network Open suggests attitudes toward large language models in health care could vary based on license and professional role. In an assessment of 9 clinics and 166 users spanning from nurses, medical assistants, and advanced practice clinicians to physicians, the majority of nurses — about 92 percent — felt an AI chatbot that drafted responses to patients’ portal requests “helped improve efficiency, empathy, and tone,” whereas other health care professionals were “less favorable,” authors wrote.
Nurses, they found, were more likely than other health care workers to agree that the chatbot reduced the need to forward patient messages to physicians and advance practice clinicians; it’s possible then that the messages that were passed on to physicians and APCs were more complex, and therefore harder for the chatbot to process, leading to less utility for those groups. These differences, and a chatbot use rate of about 12 percent, suggests that “LLMs may need to be tuned to recognize who will receive the message (MA, nurse, or physician or APC) and create a reply accordingly,” the authors wrote.
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