health tech
Hospitals are getting into the chatbot business
STAT/Adobe
More and more these days, people are turning to chatbots like ChatGPT or Claude with questions about diet, exercise, health insurance — and in some cases, serious symptoms that would typically get discussed on a 911 call or at a doctor’s office visit. As STAT’s Katie Palmer reports, some hospitals are now trying to redirect those questions by building their own patient-facing chatbots that draw directly from existing medical records and can funnel patients toward care at their facilities. It's about patient safety, they say — and finding new business.
But hospitals aren’t tech companies, and could face major liability if a chatbot fails and a patient is harmed. Read more from STAT’s Katie Palmer on how medical institutions are trying to catch up with commercial large language models.
notable quotable
‘I am indebted to the federal workers who were brave enough to share their concerns and experiences, despite their legitimate fears of reprisal.’
That was STAT’s own Lizzy Lawrence, speaking at the George Polk Awards on Friday, where she and many of my brilliant colleagues won in the health care reporting category. Read all of Lizzy’s important, groundbreaking FDA reporting, along with our series American Science, Shattered and MAHA Diagnosis.
It’s a hard time for journalists around the world. As Lizzy also said: “I am privileged to work in such a collaborative, ambitious newsroom, where editors encourage reporters to chase essential health stories and not leave any stone unturned.” Here, here.
public health
On positioning nurses as health experts
Among the American public, trust in medical doctors is at its lowest point since the ’90s, according to recent Gallup polling. Nurses, on the other hand, have long been the most trusted profession on a list of nearly two dozen, including police officers, teachers, clergy, judges, and more. A perspective published Saturday in the New England Journal of Medicine argues that this trust — which exists across political lines — should be harnessed for more effective public health messaging.
“Nurse scientists represent a largely untapped resource in national health communication,” the authors write. But despite the increased political clout gained by nurses at the height of the pandemic, they’re still too often absent from public health discussions. The authors suggest that media training should be available to nurses, and that institutions should create more opportunities for nurses to be contacted as experts by journalists. That includes asking more doctors, when approached by the media, to recommend nurse scientists.
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