AI may Enhance Patient Safety

Generative artificial intelligence (genAI) uses hundreds of millions, sometimes billions, of data points to train itself to produce realistic and innovative outputs that can mimic human-created content. Its applications include personalized recommendations for online shoppers, creating audio and visual content and accelerating engineering design. In healthcare, possible genAI uses include enhancing imaging technologies, predicting the course of a disease in an individual patient and discovering new vaccines.

BU researchers tested an advanced publicly available genAI model, GPT-4, to determine its ability to answer questions across five key areas of patient safety in the 50-question self-assessment for the Certified Professional in Patient Safety (CPPS) exam, a standardized multiple-choice certification exam for patient safety professionals. GPT-4 answered 88% of the questions correctly, demonstrating a high level of performance.

"While other studies have looked at genAI's performance on exams from different healthcare specialties over the past year, ours is the first robust test of its proficiency specifically in patient safety," said corresponding author Nicholas Cordella, MD, MSc, assistant professor of medicine at BU Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine.

James Moses, MD, MPH, formerly an associate professor of pediatrics at the school and now chief of quality, safety and patient experience at Corewell Health in Michigan, is a co-author of the study.

The researchers presented questions from the CPPS self-assessment exam to the GPT-4 model without any additional training or medical fine-tuning. They then evaluated the model's performance across various exam categories. They found GPT-4 performed particularly well in the domains of Patient Safety and Solutions, Measuring and Improving Performance, and Systems Thinking and Design/Human Factors. Based on the strength of those results, the researchers outlined areas where patient safety professionals could begin to conduct more testing of the real-world strengths and weaknesses of AI.

"Our findings suggest that AI could help doctors better recognize, address and prevent mistakes in hospitals and clinics. While more research is needed to fully understand what current AI can do in patient safety, this study shows that AI has some potential to improve healthcare by assisting clinicians in addressing preventable harms," said Cordella who also is medical director for quality and patient safety at Boston Medical Center.

He believed the use of AI holds promise for improving patient safety systems and better tackling the intractable problem of medical errors, which are estimated to cause approximately 400,000 deaths every year.

Cordella said the study aligns with the broader idea that AI can help professionals, including doctors, enhance their work. By using AI to support their tasks, clinicians may be able to improve the safety and efficiency of healthcare, similar to how other knowledge workers are adapting AI to boost their performance.

The study also revealed limitations in current AI technology and cautioned that users must remain vigilant for bias, false confidence, fabricated data or hallucinations in large language model (like GPT-4) responses.

"Our findings suggest that AI has the potential to significantly enhance patient safety, marking an enabling step towards leveraging this technology to reduce preventable harms and achieve better healthcare outcomes. However, it's important to recognize this as an initial step, and we must rigorously test and refine AI applications to truly benefit patient care," said Cordella.

Cordella N, Moses J.
Artificial Intelligence and the Practice of Patient Safety: GPT-4 Performance on a Standardized Test of Safety Knowledge.
Jt Comm J Qual Patient Saf. 2024 Oct;50(10):745-747. doi: 10.1016/j.jcjq.2024.05.007

Most Popular Now

Unlocking the 10 Year Health Plan

The government's plan for the NHS is a huge document. Jane Stephenson, chief executive of SPARK TSL, argues the key to unlocking its digital ambitions is to consider what it...

Alcidion Grows Top Talent in the UK, wit…

Alcidion has today announced the addition of three new appointments to their UK-based team, with one internal promotion and two external recruits. Dr Paul Deffley has been announced as the...

AI can Find Cancer Pathologists Miss

Men assessed as healthy after a pathologist analyses their tissue sample may still have an early form of prostate cancer. Using AI, researchers at Uppsala University have been able to...

AI, Full Automation could Expand Artific…

Automated insulin delivery (AID) systems such as the UVA Health-developed artificial pancreas could help more type 1 diabetes patients if the devices become fully automated, according to a new review...

How AI could Speed the Development of RN…

Using artificial intelligence (AI), MIT researchers have come up with a new way to design nanoparticles that can more efficiently deliver RNA vaccines and other types of RNA therapies. After training...

MIT Researchers Use Generative AI to Des…

With help from artificial intelligence, MIT researchers have designed novel antibiotics that can combat two hard-to-treat infections: drug-resistant Neisseria gonorrhoeae and multi-drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). Using generative AI algorithms, the research...

AI Hybrid Strategy Improves Mammogram In…

A hybrid reading strategy for screening mammography, developed by Dutch researchers and deployed retrospectively to more than 40,000 exams, reduced radiologist workload by 38% without changing recall or cancer detection...

Penn Developed AI Tools and Datasets Hel…

Doctors treating kidney disease have long depended on trial-and-error to find the best therapies for individual patients. Now, new artificial intelligence (AI) tools developed by researchers in the Perelman School...

New Training Year Starts at Siemens Heal…

In September, 197 school graduates will start their vocational training or dual studies in Germany at Siemens Healthineers. 117 apprentices and 80 dual students will begin their careers at Siemens...

Are You Eligible for a Clinical Trial? C…

A new study in the academic journal Machine Learning: Health discovers that ChatGPT can accelerate patient screening for clinical trials, showing promise in reducing delays and improving trial success rates. Researchers...

New AI Tool Addresses Accuracy and Fairn…

A team of researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has developed a new method to identify and reduce biases in datasets used to train machine-learning algorithms...

Global Study Reveals How Patients View M…

How physicians feel about artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine has been studied many times. But what do patients think? A team led by researchers at the Technical University of Munich...