Physicians’ Perceptions of Chatbots in Health Care: Cross-Sectional Web-Based Survey
By A. Palanica, Peter Flaschner, Anirudh Thommandram, Michael H. Li, Yan Fossat. 2018
335 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Background Many potential benefits for the uses of chatbots within the context of health care have been theorized, such as improved patient education and treatment compliance. However, little is known about the perspectives of practicing medical physicians on the use of chatbots in health care, even though these individuals are the traditional benchmark of proper patient care. Objective This study aimed to investigate the perceptions of physicians regarding the use of health care chatbots, including their benefits, challenges, and risks to patients. Methods A total of 100 practicing physicians across the United States completed a Web-based, self-report survey to examine their opinions of chatbot technology in health care. Descriptive statistics and frequencies were used to examine the characteristics of participants. Results A wide variety of positive and negative perspectives were reported on the use of health care chatbots, including the importance to patients for managing their own health and the benefits on physical, psychological, and behavioral health outcomes. More consistent agreement occurred with regard to administrative benefits associated with chatbots; many physicians believed that chatbots would be most beneficial for scheduling doctor appointments (78%, 78/100), locating health clinics (76%, 76/100), or providing medication information (71%, 71/100). Conversely, many physicians believed that chatbots cannot effectively care for all of the patients’ needs (76%, 76/100), cannot display human emotion (72%, 72/100), and cannot provide detailed diagnosis and treatment because of not knowing all of the personal factors associated with the patient (71%, 71/100). Many physicians also stated that health care chatbots could be a risk to patients if they self-diagnose too often (714%, 74/100) and do not accurately understand the diagnoses (74%, 74/100). Conclusions Physicians believed in both costs and benefits associated with chatbots, depending on the logistics and specific roles of the technology. Chatbots may have a beneficial role to play in health care to support, motivate, and coach patients as well as for streamlining organizational tasks; in essence, chatbots could become a surrogate for nonmedical caregivers. However, concerns remain on the inability of chatbots to comprehend the emotional state of humans as well as in areas where expert medical knowledge and intelligence is required.
Subfields: Applied Psychology, General Health Professions, Health Informatics, Medical & Health AI
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Citations in the corpus
- Anticipating Safety Issues in E2E Conversational AI: Framework and Tooling (2021, background): “However, medical professionals have raised serious ethical and practical concerns about the use of chatbots to answer patients’ questions (Palanica et al., 2019).”
- Guiding the Release of Safer E2E Conversational AI through Value Sensitive Design (2022, background): “Conversational and language models can also prove unsafe if they are used for medical advice or emergency situations (self-harm, crime, natural disasters, etc) (e.g. Palanica et al., 2019; Bickmore et al., 2018).”
- Chatbot for Health Care and Oncology Applications Using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: Systematic Review (2021, neutral): “A cross-sectional web-based survey of 100 practicing physicians gathered the perceptions of chatbots in health care [6].”
- Artificially intelligent chatbots in digital mental health interventions: a review (2021, methodology): “trepidation about using AI in domains like diagnostics, counseling, and delivering CBT [80,114].”
- Introducing Artificial Intelligence Training in Medical Education (2019, neutral): “As use of AI and proactive use of tools such as chatbots [42] increases, physicians and patients will need to be aware of strengths and limitations of such technologies and be trained in how to effectively and safely use them [43,44].”
- Conversational Agents in Health Care: Scoping Review and Conceptual Analysis (2020, background): “Finally, we excluded articles with poorly reported data on chatbot assessments; therefore, we may have missed some health care conversational agents (Multimedia Appendix 5 [36,97,104-188]).”