Chatbots quickly surpassed human physicians in diagnostic reasoning — the crucial first step in clinical care — according to a new study published in the journal Nature Medicine.
The study suggests physicians who have access to large language models (LLMs), which underpin generative AI (genAI) chatbots, demonstrate improved performance on several patient care tasks compared to colleagues without access to the technology.
The study also found that physicians using chatbots spent more time on patient cases and made safer decisions than those without access to the genAI tools.
The research, undertaken by more than a dozen physicians at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), showed genAI has promise as an “open-ended decision-making” physician partner.
“However, this will require rigorous validation to realize LLMs’ potential for enhancing patient care,” said Dr. Adam Rodman, director of AI Programs at BIDMC. “Unlike diagnostic reasoning, a task often with a single right answer, which LLMs excel at, management reasoning may have no right answer and involves weighing trade-offs between inherently risky courses of action.”
The conclusions were based on evaluations about the decision-making capabilities of 92 physicians as they worked through five hypothetical patient cases. They focused on the physicians’ management reasoning, which includes decisions on testing, treatment, patient preferences, social factors, costs, and risks.
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