The pandemic-driven development of virtual and Zoom care caused a surge in electronic patient messages and the University of California research shows doctors are responding by limiting responses, billing for responses or delegating responses to less trained support staff. The message bottleneck means patients are having questions that go unanswered or questions that get bad responses. The research suggests AI assistants could aid in creating answers to patient questions by drafting responses that could be reviewed by clinicians. With the AI assistant, doctors could spend less time worrying about verb-noun conjugation and their typing skills. In the study that measured the quality of the responses to health-related questions, AI was found to be 3.6 times rated as good or very good compared to physicians. Forty-five percent of AI responses were judged to be empathetic or very empathetic, compared to 4.6% of physician responses.
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