| I’m going to go out on a limb and say the last place a business would want to be is going toe to toe with OpenAI. But that’s exactly where some digital health companies have found themselves now that the AI giant is bringing ChatGPT to health systems. |
| OpenEvidence, UpToDate, Atropos Health – they all arm doctors with medical evidence to help them make decisions. But what happens to them if docs can simply ChatGPT it? I put the question to them, and they generally brushed it off. |
| “Why should it?” said Nigam Shah, cofounder of Atropos, when I asked if ChatGPT for Healthcare scared him. OpenAI and now Anthropic have commoditized using AI to search sources like medical journals, he said. But Atropos, which generates real-world evidence from clinical data, stands apart because of its hundreds of millions of patient
records, he said. |
| “None of these guys, OpenAI or whoever, have that asset. What they have is things that are on the public Internet,” Shah said. |
| OpenEvidence founder Daniel Nadler said he’ll come out on top because his company has concentrated narrowly on the healthcare industry, whereas OpenAI is broad. |
| “It would be like asking if CNN was going to dislodge CNBC when CNN started occasionally showing a stock ticker,” Nadler said. “As CNBC and its viewers know well, there is always more to it than that. Focus wins.” |
| Meanwhile, Peter Bonis, chief medical officer at Wolters Kluwer Health, which owns UpToDate, said trustworthiness is what sets the tool apart. There’s still plenty of risk in large language models: They can hallucinate, provide inconsistent responses or not incorporate a patient’s specific context. UpToDate uses editors and thousands of active clinicians to carefully curate medical information (as opposed to throwing everything on the Internet at the user); AI is layered on top of that human curation, Bonis explained. |
| That’s a lot of protesting. I’m still skeptical that these companies will end up unscathed from OpenAI competition. |
| Who’s to say OpenAI won’t strike a deal to get access to a trove of patient records or integrate with the EHR? It could be only a matter of time before ChatGPT for Healthcare becomes as ubiquitous as it has in consumer households across the US. |
| That’s not to say it’ll be the only tool doctors use in practice. John Brownstein, chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital, one of the health systems rolling out OpenAI’s new enterprise tool, said there will be different tools for different purposes. At his system, clinicians use OpenEvidence, UpToDate, an internal AI tool based on OpenAI’s tech, and soon, ChatGPT for Healthcare. He said Boston Children’s is planning to continue investing in the internal tool, despite the new OpenAI offering. |
| “We don't know how this is all gonna shake out. There is a world where physicians might have a preferable tool. There's a world in which the tool will work for different types of use cases. I don't think it's going to be a singular AI tool.” |
| - Shelby |
