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Combatting Provider Burnout: ChatGPT 4.0 Is Equivalent To A Plastic Surgery Provider In Answering Image-based Post Operative Patient Questions
Boris Joutovsky, DO1, Anna Jacobs, MD
1, Amanda Beneat, MD
1, Nisha Sondhi, MD
1, Katie Weichman, MD FAAPS
2, Lawrence Draper, MD
2.
1NYU Langone Healthcare - Long Island, Mineola, NY, USA, 2Hansjorg Wyss Department of Plastic Surgery at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, Manhattan, NY, USA.
Purpose: Dependance on electronic medical records for patient communication has risen since COVID-19, contributing to increased provider burnout. Patients have difficulty describing their surgical sites and drains, leading to unnecessary clinic visits. Creating an AI model to address patients’ image-based questions could help alleviate the burden on providers.
Methods: Image-based patient questions were collected from Reddit forum r/AskDoctors using terms “plastic surgery,” “cosmetic surgery,” and “plastics.” Responses from verified physicians, nurse practitioners (NPs), or physician assistants (PAs) were collected. A Plastic Surgery NP was asked to respond to these questions as though they were real patients. The images and questions were then entered into ChatGPT 4.0 and responses recorded. All three response types were blindly graded by PAs with experience in Plastic Surgery on quality, accuracy, and empathy.
Results: According to Figure 1, both ChatGPT 4.0 and provider responses outperformed general responses from Reddit, but were found equal to each other in all domains.
Conclusion: ChatGPT 4.0 demonstrated similar performance to a provider when addressing postoperative patient questions, specifically in terms of empathy. This suggests an AI model could alleviate the burden of common postoperative questions, even with visual components, without having patients feel that they are not speaking to a person. This is “proof of concept” for the creation of an AI model capable of responding to postoperative patient questions in plastic surgery clinics.
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