With AI firmly established in society now, healthcare professionals worldwide will need to learn how to harness the power of ChatGPT in healthcare scenarios to save time, improve efficiency and provide better care.
Whether you’re a clinician, administrator, nurse, pharmacist or researcher, integrating ChatGPT and other AI healthcare tools into your daily tasks can transform your work.
ChatGPT is revolutionising healthcare by streamlining routine tasks and enhancing patient care. From simplifying clinical documentation to supporting medical research, this AI tool is making a real difference in the way healthcare professionals work.
Curious? Here are 13 ways you can use ChatGPT to enhance common healthcare tasks.
1. Streamline clinical documentation
- Patient notes: ChatGPT can help doctors work more efficiently by generating or summarising patient notes, including SOAP notes, clinical summaries and discharge summaries, ensuring accuracy and consistency in documentation.
- Progress notes: ChatGPT can help create detailed progress notes, providing updates on patient status, treatment plans and responses to interventions, enabling healthcare teams to easily track patient care.
2. Enhance patient communication
- Health education materials: By leveraging its natural language capabilities, ChatGPT can simplify medical terms, produce easy-to-understand patient communication and explain complex conditions, treatments and procedures in a clear and approachable manner. Remember: You always need to verify any AI-generated content for AI hallucinations, accuracy and health communication best practices.
- Follow-up communication: ChatGPT can assist in drafting personalised follow-up communications, whether emails or messages, to ensure patients receive timely updates post-consultations or procedures, improving patient engagement.
3. Optimise administrative tasks
- Appointment reminders and scheduling: ChatGPT can automate the process of sending appointment reminders via email, text or phone, reducing administrative workload and enhancing appointment adherence.
- Insurance documentation: Healthcare providers can rely on ChatGPT to generate or streamline insurance claim letters and other necessary administrative documents, saving time and reducing administrative burden.
4. Simplify medical research and literature reviews
- Summarising research: ChatGPT can assist in processing large amounts of academic literature, summarising key findings, research studies and clinical guidelines to support evidence-based practice.
- Systematic reviews: ChatGPT can help extract relevant data from multiple research papers, assisting healthcare professionals and researchers in preparing and organising systematic reviews efficiently.
5. Support medical training and education
- Medical education content: ChatGPT can generate comprehensive training materials for medical students, healthcare professionals and patients, ensuring alignment with current medical best practices.
- Quizzes and practice questions: With its knowledge of medical terminology and guidelines, ChatGPT can create customised quizzes or flashcards to test the knowledge of medical professionals, reinforcing continuous learning.
6. Provide decision support
- Diagnostic assistance: ChatGPT can offer potential diagnostic suggestions based on input symptoms and patient history, helping clinicians consider a broader range of possible conditions for a more accurate diagnosis.
- Treatment recommendations: While clinical decision-making remains in the hands of healthcare providers, ChatGPT can propose evidence-based treatment options to assist in crafting personalised care plans.
7. Leverage data analysis and insights
- Healthcare data analysis: ChatGPT can help interpret and explain complex data from medical tests, lab reports, or imaging findings, providing healthcare professionals with meaningful insights for informed decision-making.
- Trends in healthcare: By analysing large datasets, ChatGPT can uncover emerging trends in healthcare, supporting policymakers and healthcare organisations in identifying areas for improvement and innovation.
8. Promote wellness and preventative care
- Lifestyle advice: ChatGPT can offer personalised wellness advice on topics like nutrition, physical activity, and stress management, ensuring recommendations align with established health guidelines.
- Preventative care tips: By providing targeted suggestions for vaccinations, screenings, and lifestyle changes, ChatGPT can assist in promoting preventative healthcare practices, ultimately improving patient outcomes.
9. Support mental health
- Mental health resources: ChatGPT can generate comprehensive mental health resources, including coping strategies, therapeutic techniques, and self-care tips, to support mental health professionals in patient care.
- Emotional support communication: While not a replacement for human interaction, ChatGPT can draft empathetic responses to patients facing mental health challenges, offering emotional support through well-crafted communication.
10. Assist with medical transcription
- Transcription of audio or notes: ChatGPT can assist in transcribing verbal notes or dictations from medical professionals or patients into written form, supporting efficiency in medical documentation workflows.
11. Improve medication management
- Medication lists and reminders: ChatGPT can generate medication lists, track schedules, and send reminders to patients about their prescriptions, promoting medication adherence and reducing errors.
- Medication education: ChatGPT can provide clear, easy-to-understand explanations of medication usage, potential side effects, interactions, and dosage instructions to ensure patient understanding.
12. Enhance clinical research recruitment
- Screening questions: ChatGPT can create and optimise questionnaires for screening clinical trial participants, helping to identify suitable candidates based on specific eligibility criteria.
- Informed consent documents: ChatGPT can generate or review consent forms to ensure they are clear, concise, and understandable, facilitating the informed consent process for patients involved in clinical research.
13. Create care plans
- Developing care plans: ChatGPT can help healthcare professionals craft comprehensive care plans tailored to individual patient needs, incorporating treatment goals, interventions, and follow-up strategies.
- Updating care plans: ChatGPT can assist in revising care plans as patients progress through treatment, ensuring updates are made based on the latest clinical data and patient feedback.
How to get started with ChatGPT in healthcare
Now that you know how ChatGPT can help streamline healthcare tasks, you might be wondering: How do I start using it in my daily practice?
Here’s a basic guide to getting started with ChatGPT.
1. Sign up and access ChatGPT
To get started, you’ll need to sign up for an OpenAI account (if you haven’t already) at openai.com. Once signed up, you’ll have access to ChatGPT either through their website or a mobile app. OpenAI offers both free and paid versions, with the paid version providing more advanced features and faster responses.
2. Familiarise yourself with the interface
Once you’re logged in, take some time to explore the interface. ChatGPT works by typing prompts into a chat window. You can interact with it like you would with a chatbot, asking questions or giving commands. To get the best results, it’s important to frame your requests clearly.
3. Start with simple requests
To get a feel for how it works, start by asking simple, direct questions or requests relevant to your healthcare tasks. Just play around and see what it’s capable of. For example:
- “Can you summarise this research paper on diabetes treatment?”
- “Write a brief patient education piece on the importance of vaccinations.”
- “Generate a progress note for a patient with hypertension.”
ChatGPT will generate a response based on your input, and you can continue the conversation by refining your requests or asking for clarification.
4. Refine your requests for better results
As you get more comfortable, you’ll notice that the quality of the output improves when you refine your prompts.
For example, instead of just asking for a “summary of a study,” you can specify the type of summary you need, like:
- “Summarise this study on diabetes treatment with a focus on new medication recommendations.”
The more specific and detailed your request, the more useful and accurate the response will be.
The power of advanced ChatGPT prompting
While the basics of ChatGPT are easy to grasp, the real magic happens with advanced prompting.
By learning to craft more precise and context-driven prompts, you can guide ChatGPT to produce exactly what you need, whether it’s patient notes, administrative reports or medical research insights.
Advanced prompting involves:
- Contextualising your request: Provide clear context around the task (e.g., “For a 65-year-old male with a history of heart disease”).
- Setting clear expectations: Specify the style, tone, or format of the output (e.g., “Provide a summary in bullet points”).
- Using follow-up prompts: If the output isn’t quite right, use follow-up prompts to fine-tune the response.
Mastering advanced prompting will help you maximise ChatGPT’s potential and ensure it supports your healthcare tasks in the most efficient way possible.
If you’re ready to dive deeper into effective prompting and learn how to leverage ChatGPT in your healthcare tasks like a pro, join our AI Prompt Writing for Healthcare course.
In this course, we cover everything from basic prompt crafting to advanced techniques that will enhance your workflow and improve the quality of AI-generated content in healthcare.
Remember
While ChatGPT can assist in streamlining tasks and improving efficiency in healthcare, it should never be relied upon as the sole source of information or decision-making.
While it can help save time, all information generated by ChatGPT must be reviewed by a qualified healthcare professional.
It is essential to verify all facts, check original sources, and ensure accuracy before making any clinical, administrative or research decisions.
AI tools like ChatGPT are designed to enhance workflows, but they do not replace the expertise, judgment and critical thinking of healthcare professionals.
Since AI can sometimes misinterpret context or provide incomplete information, it is crucial to double-check all generated content, especially when dealing with patient care, medical decisions or sensitive data.
Relying solely on AI without expert verification could result in errors that impact patient safety and care outcomes.
Therefore, ChatGPT should always be used as a supplementary tool, with expert oversight ensuring the accuracy and reliability of any final output.
The final word
By integrating ChatGPT in healthcare, healthcare professionals can automate routine tasks, improve documentation accuracy, and enhance communication with patients. The use of AI tools like ChatGPT is transforming healthcare operations, allowing providers to focus on delivering higher-quality care and improving patient outcomes.
