An Indonesian analysis of doctors’ chat records in online health forums has revealed that some kinds of artificial intelligence tools are better than others in deriving meaning. The findings could assist researchers around the world to process complex text and draw conclusions.
One of the rapidly growing health services today is telemedicine, after a surge precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Telemedicine has proven to be invaluable in diverting patients from long waits in the emergency room and has changed the practices of thousands of healthcare providers. One type of telemedicine is online health consulting, a text-based chat appointment between patient and doctor. Such chats take place on social media, health websites or mobile applications. Patients send images and/or questions and doctors assess the severity of the disease and make an early diagnosis.
However, whether doctors are providing appropriate precautionary advice, especially for high-risk diseases, is unknown. Artificial intelligence and natural language processing were employed to explore doctors’ messaging from 2014-2021. Natural language processing refers to the use of AI to help computers understand text and spoken language with comparable complexity to humans.
