In the News: AI Chatbots in Medicine
By Alessandra Suuberg, Decency LLC
In recent weeks, several outlets have reported on the use of AI chatbots in medicine, in roles such as diagnosis, virtual care, and patient self-triage.
Here are some of the stories making headlines in 2026:
Virtual Appointments
On May 9, the Boston Globe reported that patients had “made over 14,000 virtual appointments” since the launch of a Mass General Brigham AI virtual care platform.
The Globe reported that MGB launched the platform in September, allowing patients to answer questions and set “up a telehealth appointment with a physician in as little as half an hour.”
AI Chatbots for Medical Advice
On May 5, the Harvard Gazette posed the question: “Should you ask ChatGPT for medical advice?” The Gazette published an interview with Adam Rodman, an internist and AI researcher cited as “think[ing] [these types of] resources, used appropriately, are an overall net good.”
On April 16, PBS News reported on a West Health-Gallup Center on Healthcare in America poll, conducted in 2025, that “found . . . roughly one-quarter of U.S. adults had used an AI tool for health information or advice in the past 30 days.”
On April 15, the University of Minnesota CIDRAP reported on a BMJ Open study that suggested “half of answers provided by five publicly available artificial intelligence (AI)-driven chatbots in response to medically related questions are inaccurate and incomplete.”
Conclusions in the cited BMJ Open study included that “audited chatbots performed poorly when answering questions in misinformation-prone health and medical fields.” The researchers suggested that “[c]ontinued deployment without public education and oversight risks amplifying misinformation.”
AI Chatbots and Unlawful Practice of Medicine
On May 5, NPR reported that the state of Pennsylvania was suing a company whose “AI chatbots” reportedly “pose[d] as doctors and offer[ed] medical advice, in violation of state medical licensing rules.”
NPR quoted a statement from Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, saying that “Pennsylvanians deserve to know who—or what—they are interacting with online, especially when it comes to their health.”
When AI Outperforms Doctors
On April 30, the Guardian reported on a “groundbreaking Harvard study” that found “AI systems outperformed human doctors in high-pressure emergency medicine triage.”
The Guardian linked to the corresponding study published in April in Science.
AI Chatbots for Self-Triage
On April 23, the University of California San Diego reported that an AI chatbot developed by a UCSD research team “could reliably help people decide what to do about their symptoms . . . based on guidance that is both medically sound and easy to understand.”
The university linked to a corresponding study published in March in Nature.
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