This AI tool promises a 'second pair of eyes' to clinicians. Did patients benefit?

Global Health This AI tool promises a 'second pair of eyes' to clinicians. Did patients benefit? July 23, 20267:36 AM ET By  Joseph Kim A health worker measures the blood pressure of a woman at Penda Health Clinic Umoja II in Nairobi, Kenya, where researchers have tested an AI tool that can check out the notes taken by clinicians. Patrick Meinhardt/AFP/via Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Patrick Meinhardt/AFP/via Getty Images A 4-month-old boy comes into the clinic with a fever and a stuffy nose. Vyonne Njeri thinks it's just a cold. Then a yellow box pops up on her computer telling her to check his heart — because his heart rate is elevated. Njeri is a registered clinical officer in Nairobi, Kenya; she sees patients on her own like a nurse practitioner. When she listens with a stethoscope she hears a whoosh — a sign that the infant could have a congenital heart defect.  "That's something I would have missed on any other day," Njeri says of the visit a few months ago. "That child would have just gone home." She credits an AI tool that double checks her work for helping her. Njeri referred him to a specialist who confirmed the diagnosis and started him on medications; the child may have to undergo surgery. Sponsor Message The tool, called AI Consult, was tested in a randomized trial of nearly 10,000 patient encounters across 16 Kenyan primary clinics operated by Penda Health, and the results were published this summer in Nature Medicine. Half the clinical officers typed their notes into a computer with OpenAI's GPT-4o checking their electronic notes in the background. GPT-4o is a large language model, or LLM — the kind of AI that powers chatbots like ChatGPT. They've been trained on much of the internet and can generate text in response to instructions. The other half used a computer for note-taking without the AI tool. Here's how the AI program works. It provides three prompts — green, yellow and red, like a traffic light. The AI looks for possible pro...