Speaker: ChatGPT is a forward-thinking path toward curbing clinician burnout

Key takeaways:

• Using ChatGPT can provide tangible personal and professional benefits to health care workers.
• Real change in medicine can occur when physicians “lead the way,” a speaker said.

Necessary changes within the health care system will only arise when workers are allowed more time and space personally and professionally, with ChatGPT the method by which this transformation can occur, according to Robert Pearl, MD.

In his keynote address during the Ending Clinician Burnout Global Summit, Pearl, clinical professor of plastic surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine and former CEO of The Permanente Medical Group, issued a challenge to his colleagues to take the reins and actively shape the future of their profession as clinician burnout continues to be a widespread issue.

“I believe this is the way that we, as clinicians, are going to be able to take back control,” he said. “The sooner we address that, the sooner we can address burnout.”

With conversations surrounding clinician burnout taking place for at least the past decade, Pearl rhetorically asked why ensuring burnout is eliminated at the individual level has not been addressed, in favor of expanded health and wellness solutions for clinicians.

Further, he asserted that nothing will be solved unless physicians themselves, individually and collectively, band together.

Regarding personal benefits, Pearl opined that ChatGPT can ease day-to-day planning in times when the demands of their profession overlap with or intrude on life.

“You can ask for a week-long menu. It can give you a shopping list. It can do [that] in every language. It can organize your workouts. It can find you a running group. It can do all of the activities that are necessary,” he noted.

Within medicine, some form of AI has existed since the previous century, Pearl said, beginning with rules-based generative systems that guided physicians toward consistent and correct diagnoses and prescriptions.

A big first step toward better integration of machine-related services, he suggested, is that clinicians should seek out any method to boost their body of knowledge to improve generative output, as the system is only as good as the individual providing the input.

To address concerns of bias, Pearl offered that the generative mechanism should be loaded with all available clinical studies and existing medical information on a particular condition to provide as objective an answer as possible.

Pearl stressed that each physician should advocate for the implementation of AI to help control burnout.

“I do not believe on their own that the for-profit insurance companies and hospital systems and other individuals responsible for creating the symptoms of burnout that exist, that they are going to change,” he said. “It’s not in their interest to do so unless we are able to lead the way.”