OpenAI said today that it is integrating ChatGPT Health with Epic’s electronic health record (EHR) system, which holds data for over 325 million patients, to let clinicians import patient data and use AI to ask questions. The company said that in certain systems, it will also integrate ChatGPT directly within EHR workflows.
With ChatGPT, clinicians can now access information like appointment notes, laboratory results, medications, and specialist documentation and summarize them easily. They can also look at patient history, identify changes, and prepare for future appointments. OpenAI said that in some deployments, clinicians can directly access ChatGPT for getting pre-visit review and building clinical timelines without leaving a patient chart. The company specified that the integration allows only read-only access to health records, and AI doesn’t write anything back.
OpenAI is also adding a new Healthcare Public Data plug-in, which can fetch information from sources including ClinicalTrials.gov, CMS Coverage, RxNorm, DailyMed, and PubMed. The company said that the new plug-in can help healthcare workers synthesize data for trial eligibility criteria, medication identifiers, coverage policy versions, and provider records.
The company said that apart from enabling these new features, it is allowing organizations with a Business Associate Agreement to use ChatGPT Work, Codex, apps, and connectors in their workspace for compliant workflows.
Last month, OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT for health to all U.S. consumers. The company said at that time that people are asking 300 million health-related queries to ChatGPT every week. Despite many deep integrations with medical systems, the company has maintained that AI is not suitable for diagnosis or treatment.
OpenAI said that it collected over 4,300 responses from physicians across 27 clinical use cases, including pre-visit review, clinical timelines, medication review, and handoff summaries, and found that 99.1% of responses were safe. However, even a few unsafe answers can lead to harmful results for humans.
A few days before this rollout, a Florida-based pastor sued the company, alleging that ChatGPT gave him a near-fatal recommendation. The company was also sued in May by family members of a user who blamed ChatGPT for giving wrongful advice related to dosage.
