Re: https://www.hifa.org/dgroups-rss/mhealth-innovate-18-why-are-health-work...
Dear Peter and colleagues,
Many thanks for sharing with us the results of asking Chat GPT two questions relating to our discussion:
How are basic phones and smartphones being used across the world by health care professionals?
What proportion of health workers have a smartphone across the world?
The Chat GPT responses are impressive.
In a sense, Chat GPT is being modest (!) because it doesn't recognise itself as a potential source of reliable healthcare information. For anyone with an internet connection it is now possible to ask basic (and advanced) healthcare questions and the responses can be expected to be very accurate - not 100%, but approaching this, dependent on context.
In 1987 in rural Peru I witnessed a child who had died minutes before because her parents thought they should treat her diarrhoea by withholding fluids. Later I learned this is a common misconception worldwide, and this belief *continues* to contribute to avoidable child deaths. Similar lack of basic healthcare knowledge prevails. In the past decade or more this has been fuelled by misinformation and disinformation.
A large part of the problem is that people are unable to differentiate reliable information from misinformation. This is true for much of tha general public, and it is even true at the highest levels of the US Administration.
I believe Chat GPT (and similar AI tools) will be a game changer. Increasingly they will be more available and more accurate/reliable. In turn, the general public will gradually come to use and trust them more and more. Checking how Chat GPT responds to healthcare questions will become second nature. It will also dramatically weaken the efforts of mavericks to spread disinformation.
Best wishes, Neil
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org