Patients at Charlotte, N.C.-based Advocate Health are linking their medical records to ChatGPT at a rapidly accelerating pace, and the health system is footing part of the bill for a connection it never turned on.
The number of patients at the 69-hospital system who linked their MyChart accounts to ChatGPT rose more than 7,000% from July to August, Advocate Health Executive Vice President and CIO Bobbie Byrne, MD, told Becker’s. Each linked account, and each request a patient enters into ChatGPT, generates API calls against Advocate’s Epic EHR.
“Because we are Epic-hosted, we have great transparency in API costs,” Dr. Byrne said.
OpenAI launched ChatGPT Health in January before making the tool broadly available in July, letting consumers connect medical records and wellness apps to the chatbot. Dr. Byrne stressed that Advocate did nothing to enable the patient connections.
“This is completely driven by individual patient actions,” she said.
That sets the trend apart from the clinician-facing Epic integration OpenAI announced Sept. 1, which health systems choose whether to activate. Patients, conversely, link their accounts on OpenAI’s site, Dr. Byrne said, so Advocate does “not have any real visibility or influence on this day to day.”
“There is some cost to us based on the volume of patients and the number of requests each patient enters into Chat. There is compute power required for this, so that will be cost to someone,” Dr. Byrne said. “Right now we can absorb the amounts, but I would be concerned if the growth rate escalates.”
Dr. Byrne said she understands Epic is working with OpenAI to make the API calls as technically efficient as possible.
Dr. Byrne first flagged the trend during the Sept. 14 opening keynote at Becker’s 11th Annual IT + Revenue Cycle Conference in Chicago, where she described a paradox in public attitudes: that “even as we see that people are more distrustful of AI, they are using AI more.” She said Advocate could track the growth in patients’ ChatGPT connections through its own systems.
“I see that because we start to see those API calls against us,” she said at the conference. “So I’m like, wow, this is really dramatically increasing month over month.”
Dr. Byrne said she supports patients using the tool, even as the costs land on the health system.
“We certainly want patients to feel empowered in their care. If using ChatGPT helps patients further understand their health, I want to support it,” she said. “Like many things in our healthcare system, there is a disconnect between who benefits and who pays.”
