Some UNC Health doctors will use AI to message patients in the My Chart patient portal
In the next few weeks, some UNC Health doctors will begin to use artificial intelligence to help write messages to their patients.
A deal announced last week with Microsoft and Epic, an electronic medical records company, will allow the system’s physicians to use a generative AI tool — similar to ChatGPT — to automatically draft messages in My Chart, the patient portal.
The partnership aims to address what UNC Health sees as a major threat to staff retention: an onslaught of patient questions.
Ever since the pandemic pushed telemedicine mainstream, the number of patient messages to their providers has “substantially increased,” said Dr. David McSwain, UNC Health’s chief medical informatics officer.
These messages are often straightforward and repetitive, like requests for prescription refills or lab results.
UNC doctors, as a result, are spending more and more of their time crafting responses to administrative questions, rather than spending face-to-face time with their patients, said Brent Lamm, the health system’s chief information officer.
“The reality is a lot of our physicians are working late into the evenings, responding to patient messages,” he said. “This is something that has caused real physician burnout.”
Enter the new AI tool.
Instead of drafting a response to the patient from scratch, the doctor can press a button that lets the AI take a first crack at an answer.
It pulls information from the patient’s electronic medical records — like what conditions they’re diagnosed with and what medications they take — and draws up a couple of paragraphs of suggested copy. The doctor can change the draft to her taste and send it off.
“It’s going to take that cognitive burden off the physician to have to craft the initial response,” Lamm said. “They can instead be editors.”
McSwain said in most cases, patients will not know that the generative AI was involved in crafting the message. As long as the doctor has full control over editing and personalizing the text, leadership decided it should be treated like a normal doctor’s message.
The algorithm is trained to get better over time. It keeps track of how the doctor edited the response to produce a draft next time that’s even closer— in tone and content— to what the physician would have written.
Once the algorithm has a handle on answering those straightforward requests, UNC Health may begin piloting it with more complicated patient questions.
“We love the capability that generative AI is bringing to the table and this helps harness that power but in a safe manner — we can control that the data and information,” Lamm said.
McSwain said there is a growing waitlist of UNC doctors who are eager to use the new technology. For now, the pilot program will start with 10 doctors of different specialties and, if all goes well, more doctors will be added in later stages of the testing.
McSwain said he sees an even larger role for this technology at UNC Health if the pilot programs are successful. He said he could see how this tool could also help unburden nursing staff from some administrative duties.
UNC Health is the first health care system in the Southeast to use generative AI for this purpose. Microsoft and Epic have three other partners nationally: UC San Diego Health, UW Health in Madison, Wisconsin, and Stanford Health Care.
Teddy Rosenbluth covers science and health care for The News & Observer in a position funded by Duke Health and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work.
This story was originally published May 30, 2023 at 6:00 AM.
