INTRODUCTION: In 2005, Pew Research reported that 80% of Americans used the internet to search for medical information.1 Medical information can be difficult for patients to understand, especially when they require surgical intervention. A survey conducted by the American Health Information Management Association Foundation found that 11% of Americans leave their appointment more confused and 25% do not feel comfortable asking their doctor certain health-related questions.2 Following a doctor’s visit 42% research their provider’s suggestions, with 80% reporting that they use the internet to do so.2 Although traditional search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo remain popular among Americans for locating information, Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (ChatGPT) (Open AI, San Francisco, CA) has emerged as a new source to gather information. This study aimed to evaluate its applicability in medical and surgical information gathering in the lay public.
METHODS: An 18-item questionnaire was distributed using Amazon Mechanical Turk (abbreviated as MTurk) to assess the lay public’s views and experience using OpenAI’s Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (ChatGPT) as a means of obtaining health information related to surgical procedures. To assess knowledge and utilization of ChatGPT, chi-squared analyses were carried out to compare questionnaire answers between younger participants and participants 65 years and older. The same analysis was used to compare demographic information between participants who have used ChatGPT to those who have not. Statistical significance was defined as a 2 tailed P < 0.05. All statistical analyses were carried out using Stata 18 (StataCorp LLC, College Station, TX).
RESULTS: A total of 667 respondents completed the questionnaire. A majority of respondents (93.7%, n = 625) reported searching the internet for health information, with 68.4% reporting that they have used ChatGPT to search for health-related information. Roughly 95% of respondents reported having heard of ChatGPT (94.8%, n = 632) and almost 82% of participants had used it in the past (81.6%, n = 544). Interestingly, the most common surgical information searched was “procedure details” (27.7%), followed by “surgeon education” (19.6%). When comparing ChatGPT users to those that had not tried the chatbot, age varied significantly with higher proportions of individuals aged 25-34 having tried the chatbot than other groups (p = 0.002). More than 60% of participants who used ChatGPT reported that they would prefer to use ChatGPT to search for medical information instead of traditional search engines due to its convenience and comprehensiveness.
CONCLUSIONS: ChatGPT is a rapidly growing platform for patients to obtain medical information. The Internet is still a major source of information prior to surgery and our data demonstrate that patients are most interested in information like procedure details and surgeon’s education. Surgeons should be aware of the rapid evolution of medical information delivery and recognize that providing this information preemptively will help with patients’ counselling processes.
REFERENCES:
1. Susannah F. Health Information Online. Pew Research Center. Updated 2014-02-13. https://policycommons.net/artifacts/620412/health-information-online/
2. Understanding, Access and Use of Health Information in America. AHIMA Foundation. 2023. https://ahimafoundation.org/media/ngfbggsk/oct2021_understanding_access_use_health_information_america_ahima_foundation.pdf