Medicare Compliance & Reimbursement

Clinicians, providers, and healthcare administrators need to judiciously evaluate LLMs if the professionals plan to use the tools to improve health information access, to augment decision making, or as a diagnostic tool.

“While WHO is enthusiastic about the appropriate use of technologies, including LLMs, to support health-care professionals, patients, researchers and scientists, there is concern that caution that would normally be exercised for any new technology is not being exercised consistently with LLMs,” the organization said in a news release.

The caution normally employed for new technologies includes healthcare professionals remaining cognizant of healthcare’s key values, such as transparency, public engagement, inclusion, expert supervision, and responsible evaluation. Without careful assessment of AI systems and staff education, adopting untested AI systems could lead healthcare workers to commit dangerous errors, which may cause patient harm and an erosion of trust in the technology, WHO noted.

LLMs have the potential to replicate how humans understand, process, and relay information. The most commonly used LLM platforms include OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. While helpful in many occupations, industry experts have called for oversight of the technology due to concerns, such as: biased data used to train AI; authoritative sounding answers that contain incorrect information; and health data with identifiable information that puts patients’ privacy at risk.

“WHO proposes that these concerns be addressed, and clear evidence of benefit be measured before their widespread use in routine health care and medicine — whether by individuals, care providers or health system administrators and policymakers,” the organization added.

Review the release at www.who.int/news/item/16-05-2023- who-calls-for-safe-and-ethical-ai-for-health.