When it’s time to have a difficult conversation with a dying patient about whether to insert a feeding tube, Dr Jonathan Chen, an internist at Stanford, practices first with a chatbot. He asks the bot to be a doctor while he plays the role of the patient. Then he reverses the roles.
He feels uncomfortable doing it. The bot is so good at finding ways to talk to patients. Doctors also know it is so good at diagnosing and so good at reading scans and images – better than many doctors, in fact – and so good at answering patient questions in portals and writing appeals to insurance companies when a medication or procedure is denied.
