OpenAI Integrates ChatGPT Health into Epic in Read-Only Mode

OpenAI plans to connect ChatGPT Health to Epic's medical records and add a public data plug-in. The company emphasizes read-only access and reiterates that the tool is not intended for diagnosis, while safety assessments and legal actions govern its use.

OpenAI Releases Safety Numbers and Reminds of Lack of Clinical Intent

OpenAI reports having collected over 4,300 feedback responses from physicians covering 27 clinical use cases and estimates that 99.1% of the generated responses were safe. The company further asserts that its AI is not suitable for diagnosis or treatment, despite technical integrations with medical systems. This context is also marked by legal actions: just days before the public rollout, a pastor in Florida filed a lawsuit alleging that a recommendation from ChatGPT was nearly fatal, and in May, relatives of a user sued the company, attributing erroneous dosage advice to the service. Even a small number of unsafe responses can have detrimental consequences for patients.

What Clinicians Will Be Able to Do and What the AI Will Not Do

OpenAI announces that clinicians will be able to consult appointment notes, lab results, treatments, and specialist documents within ChatGPT and obtain summaries. They will also be able to review a patient's history, identify changes, and prepare for upcoming visits; certain implementations will provide direct access for pre-visit review and the creation of clinical timelines without leaving the record. The company specifies that access will be strictly read-only and that the AI will not write any content in the record. A module dedicated to public health data is also announced, capable of querying ClinicalTrials.gov, CMS Coverage, RxNorm, DailyMed, and PubMed, in order to aggregate eligibility criteria for trials, drug identifiers, various versions of coverage policies, as well as information about providers.

Integration Scope, Usage Conditions, and Public Reach

OpenAI plans to connect ChatGPT Health to Epic's records system to enable the import of patient data and queries to the AI, and specifies that this integration may, in certain environments, be embedded directly into EHR workflows. Organizations with a business partner agreement will be able to use ChatGPT Work, Codex, applications, and connectors within their space for compliant pathways. Last month, the health version of ChatGPT was made available to all American consumers, at which time the company mentioned 300 million weekly health-related queries. Epic aggregates information concerning over 325 million patients, which gives an indication of the potential technical scope targeted.