Drugs are the cornerstone of medicine, but sometimesdoctorMistakes can be made when prescribing, and patients may not take their medications correctly. A new AI tool developed at Oxford University DrugGPT DrugGPT is designed to address these two issues.Whole network, while also providing them with information that helps patients better understand the purpose and method of taking the medicine.
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Doctors and other medical professionals who prescribe medications can get an instant second opinion by typing their patient's condition into the chatbot. The prototype version will respond with a list of recommended medications, annotated with possible adverse reactions and drug interactions. "One of the cool things is that it explains why it's that way," said Professor David Clifton, who led the project. He noted that DrugGPT displays guidance information, research findings, flow charts and references, and explains why a particular drug is recommended.
Some doctors already use mainstream AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, to review diagnoses and write medical notes or letters. International medical associations have previously advised doctors not to use these tools, in part because chatbots can provide false information, or what technologists call hallucinations. However, Clifton and his colleagues said in a preprint on the effectiveness of DrugGPT that it performed at a level competitive with human experts on the U.S. medical licensing exam.
"Imagine if you're a GP: you're trying to keep up with the myriad medical guidelines that are updated every year, and it's difficult," Clifton said. He stressed that it was important not to take away the role of the human being. Other studies have found that there are around 237 million medication errors in the UK each year, costing around £98 million and more than 1,700 deaths.
A study published in the British Medical Journal found that only about 21% of TP3T errors could lead to serious harm, while GPs made 10% more mistakes than GPs.lowest, prescriber error rates in care settingsHighestPatients also make mistakes with medication, with “non-adherence” costing the NHS in England an estimated £300m. Some general practices already use technology like ScriptSwitch, which checks drug choices and lets prescribers choose cheaper options.
Dr Lucy McKillop, an obstetrician and gynaecologist at Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, advised the AI Medical team. Dr McKillop said the potential benefit of DrugGPT is to give busy doctors more information about the drugs they prescribe. “If you talk to patients about it, they are more likely to understand and comply with their medication, so the drug overall is more likely to work and do what it’s supposed to do,” she said.
Dr Michael Mulholland, vice-president of the Royal College of General Practitioners, said that in the vast majority of cases, the prescriptions are correct. But "doctors are only human and errors can happen, especially when doctors are working under huge pressure and human resource pressures, as GPs and our team are currently. For patients who take a large number of medications at the same time, errors may be more, because drugs can interact in many different ways." Dr Mulholland said that they are always happy to introduce more complex safety measures to support us in reducing human errors - we just need to ensure that any new tools and systems are robust and pilot tested before being promoted more widely to avoid any unexpected and unintended consequences.
Ultimately, the most effective and lasting solution to ensuring safe patient care is to ensure that GPs are adequately funded and staffed and that sufficient numbers of GPs and other medical professionals are working at safe levels.