Perspectives on artificial intelligence–generated responses to patient messages

Perspectives on artificial intelligence–generated responses to patient messages
JAMA Network Open; Jiyeong Kim, PhD, MPH; Michael L. Chen, BA; Shawheen J. Rezaei, MPhil; April S. Liang, MD; Susan M. Seav, MD; Sonia Onyeka, MD; Julie J. Lee, MD, MPH; Shivam C. Vedak, MD, MBA; David Mui, MD, MBA; Rayhan A. Lal, MD; Michael A. Pfeffer, MD; Christopher Sharp, MD; Natalie M. Pageler, MD, MEd; Steven M. Asch, MD, MPH; Eleni Linos, MD, DrPH; 10/24
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to assist clinicians in responding to patients’ messages. Satisfaction was consistently higher with AI-generated responses than with clinicians overall and by specialty. However, satisfaction was not necessarily concordant with the clinician-determined information quality and empathy. For example, satisfaction was highest with AI responses to cardiology questions while information quality and empathy were highest in endocrinology questions. Interestingly, clinicians’ response length was associated with satisfaction while AI’s response length was not. The findings suggest that the extreme brevity of responses could be a factor that lowers satisfaction in patient-clinician communication in EHR.