Is Patient-Facing AI a Trusted Source of Information for Patients?

Patients are increasingly turning to the Internet to get healthcare information from sources such as chatbots and search engines.

This poses a problem for healthcare leaders and clinicians because these sources of information do not account for the medical histories and conditions of patients, which can lead to patients getting inaccurate or misleading guidance about their health and wellness.

That’s why Hartford HealthCare has adopted a powerful AI tool to provide personalized healthcare information to the health system’s patients.

PatientGPT, a new AI tool developed by the health system and K Health, can securely access the patient’s medical history to provide personalized answers for patient questions as well as connect patients with a virtual visit through Hartford HealthCare’s HHC 24/7 platform or an appointment with a primary care provider or specialist.

“We feel that Hartford HealthCare should be a trusted source of health information for our patients, who have their primary care physicians and specialty care physicians with us,” says Padmanabhan Premkumar, MD, president of Hartford HealthCare Medical Group. “We want to be the resource for patients to ask their questions and to get relevant answers.”

“With PatientGPT, there is no uploading of patient information,” Premkumar says. “PatientGPT knows who you are, and PatientGPT has access to patients’ medical history, medications, and visits at Hartford HealthCare. PatientGPT can provide personalized information.”

For example, if a patient has a question about their diet, it is important to have information such as whether the patient has diabetes or hypertension. By knowing about a patient’s medical conditions, PatientGPT can give personalized guidance, which makes the tool different from generalized chatbots and search engines.

PatientGPT has a conversational agent that is similar to chatbots on the Internet, but it has more capabilities.

“A patient accesses PatientGPT, then asks the AI tool any prompt or question such as about lab results, upcoming appointments, or medications,” Premkumar says. “PatientGPT uses the EHR, logic that is built into the tool, and clinical triage to guide the patient through the conversation. Then PatientGPT can potentially guide the patient to clinical care such as a primary care provider, specialist, or HHC 24/7.”

Governance and validation

Hartford HealthCare conducted due diligence in the adoption of PatientGPT, including an AI governance process and validation of the information that the AI tool provides to patients.

Validation of PatientGPT’s performance was rigorous, because the patient-facing tool draws information from the EHR, according to Premkumar.

“We built relevant guardrails starting with a pilot to test the AI tool, [and] we conducted two institutional review board studies of PatientGPT,” Premkumar says. “We analyzed 200 patient interactions with PatientGPT to test the quality and safety of the tool.”

In Hartford HealthCare’s latest pilot of PatientGPT, patient interactions with PatientGPT were reviewed to validate that the information being provided by the AI tool was accurate across several domains such as quality and safety.

“We wanted to conduct this validation review before we rolled out PatientGPT for our entire patient population,” Premkumar says.