Confused by doctor’s prescription? NYU Langone develops AI-based prescription reader

Most people agree that deciphering the doctor’s prescription is an arduous task that demands a special skill. However, the chemist at your local medical store would easily ‘unlock’ the mystery just by glancing at the prescription. It is not just the poor handwriting that makes the prescription illegible. The complex medical jargon too makes it difficult for the common man to understand the details. Deciphering the medical prescriptions will now get easier as a new AI-based tool would convert it into the common man’s diction. It was NYU Langone (a New York-based medical school) that developed the prescription reader with the help of generative AI. For this, they used Chat GPT’s deep learning system GPT – 4.

Researchers say that the chatbot was able to convert the information in the discharge notes of 50 patients into a common language. They noted that with the help of generative AI, the data in these notes were simplified from the standard of an eleventh grader to a sixth grader’s. The research team verified the accuracy of the AI-generated translations with the help of expert doctors. The doctors had given the best accuracy rating for almost 54% of the discharge notes that were converted into layman’s language. They observed that 56% of the notes were precise. Meanwhile, the researchers are all set to initiate a pilot program that aims to seek the patients’ opinions about the accuracy of the notes prepared using AI tools.