Doctors at Huntsville Hospital say they are using a ChatGPT style tool to quickly look up medical research – WAFF

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (WAFF) – Doctors at Huntsville Hospital said they are using a ChatGPT style tool to quickly pull up the latest medical research while treating patients.
According to NBC News, the company behind the tool said about 65 percent of U.S. doctors have used it, and doctors ran about 27 million searches in April alone.
The tool is called OpenEvidence.
Dr. Paul Tabereaux is a physician at Huntsville Hospital who uses the tool himself.
He said tools like this are catching on with more and more doctors.
Tabereaux said doctors have always used research tools, but AI is a newer, faster way to pull together a lot of information rather than flipping through textbooks or journals.
He said OpenEvidence is an app doctors can open on their phones, type in a clinical question, and receive an answer with citations they can review.
He said OpenEvidence pulls information from cited, peer reviewed journals, so doctors can check the sources themselves.
Tabereaux stressed the tool does not make medical decisions.
He said it is meant to support doctors by providing information that can help them make the right call for patients.
He also said the platform is restricted to physicians, and users have to verify they are a doctor to use it.
Tabereaux said medical information changes too fast for textbooks, which is why doctors rely on tools like this to keep up.
“On just a normal day in clinic or a normal day on call, we will come across issues or concerns or decision making that requires input. It’s not something that I’m going to keep in my memory base,” Tabereaux said. “And so I have to turn to a tool that helps give me new information. ‘What’s the newest treatment, the latest decision about a drug A versus B?’ And so for that reason, I turn to it pretty much daily to draw from the latest information in my decision making.”
Tabereaux said the tool is not used directly with patients right now.
Instead, he described it as something doctors use behind the scenes while thinking through the right treatments and care.
As AI becomes more common in health care, Tabereaux said patients should know when it is being used, and he expects oversight to play a role in protecting patients.
Tabereaux also said patient identifying information is not included when doctors use the tool.
Even so, he said these products are designed to meet HIPAA standards in case protected information is entered.
“Despite that, these are still HIPAA compliant products, meaning that they have and meet the standard to protect patient information if it were by chance utilized in a question,” Tabereaux said. “However, on a typical question, we wouldn’t be asking specifics that include anything related to the patient’s name or specific PHI.”
Tabereaux said he thinks this is just the first step for AI in medicine.
He said the next step could be ambient listening, technology that helps with note taking during appointments so doctors spend less time typing and more time face to face with patients.
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