After a trial in recent months, carried out within the UMCG and the ETZ in Tilburg, the UMCG is now the first hospital in Europe to use the chatbot to help healthcare providers answer written questions from patients. UMCG reports this. 

 

Every week, patients ask their UMCG healthcare provider more than 1200 written questions. These questions concern, for example, medication use, pain management and being allowed to exercise/work/travel again after an operation.

During the trial period, the way in which the system answers patients' questions was refined. It is not a self-learning system, the chatbot does not learn from our patient data, according to the UMCG statement. It is expected that it can significantly reduce the administrative pressure on doctors, nurse specialists and other healthcare providers.

Data protection

The AI ​​application was developed by EPD supplier Epic and functions within the electronic patient file (EPD). The bot reads the patient's question and provides an answer suggestion. The healthcare provider receives the draft answer created by AI, checks it and adjusts it where necessary. The chatbot is integrated into the EPD, so patient data remains secure within the system. The supplier cannot reach it either.

During the trial period, healthcare providers carefully checked the AI-generated answers. Tom van der Laan, ENT doctor and Chief Medical Information Officer (CMIO) at the UMCG: “It is wonderful to see what artificial intelligence is capable of. But healthcare remains human work: there is always a doctor or nurse who checks the answer before we send it. Artificial intelligence can support and make work easier, but healthcare professionals are irreplaceable in healthcare for the time being.”
This application is already used in various hospitals in America, says UMCG. “The experiences there are very positive. You may think that such a system makes contact with the care provider more impersonal, but nothing could be further from the truth. Because healthcare providers now answer questions between companies, they often do so somewhat curtly. Artificial intelligence not only appears to provide more informative and comprehensive answers, but AI also does so more empathetically. We expect that we will have the same positive experiences in the Netherlands,” said Van der Laan in the UMCG press release.

Many more options

AI offers many more possibilities for healthcare. “If I now have one half-day consultation at the outpatient clinic, it costs me about 1,5 to 2 hours of preparation time,” says Van der Laan. “I read the file of every patient, for example, look at changes in medication use and treatments by other healthcare providers. If AI can make a summary of this with only the relevant information, it can save a lot of time. But AI can also, for example, create a patient-friendly summary of an operation report, or quickly write a discharge letter so that the GP is quickly informed about the patient's hospital admission. I expect that we will see many more applications in healthcare in the coming years. First mainly with the so-called language models such as ChatGPT, but eventually also with robotics. The applications are endless.”

In the coming weeks and months, more Dutch hospitals with an EPD from the same supplier will use this application, in collaboration with other hospitals from the EPIC Dutch Association. Collaboration with other hospitals makes it possible to benefit from this technology even faster, jointly for the patient and healthcare providers. (UMCG)

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