Hospitals Roll Out Chatbots to Reclaim Patient Health Conversations

Every day, more than 40 million people ask ChatGPT about health care, according to OpenAI. They’re asking questions about diet, exercise, insurance — and in some cases, serious symptoms that would typically get discussed on a 911 call or in a doctor’s office.

For some health systems, that’s creating an imperative. A small number of hospitals are trying to recapture some of those clinical conversations from commercial large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.

They’re implementing their own patient-facing chatbots, ones that draw directly from their existing medical records and can funnel patients toward care in their own system.  Hartford HealthCare this week will launch PatientGPT, a chatbot engineered by clinical AI company K Health, to its patients in Connecticut. Two health systems — California-based Sutter Health and Reid Health, serving Indiana and Ohio — have announced pilot versions of Emmie, the chatbot built by medical record mammoth Epic.

The list is likely to grow rapidly. Continue to STAT+ to read the full story...