UTHealth Houston unveiled a partnership with OpenAI on Friday to build and deploy algorithms for use in medical training and at the patient’s bedside.
UTHealth Houston is a comprehensive academic health university in Texas that teaches dentistry, medicine, nursing, public health, behavioral health sciences, biomedical informatics and biomedical sciences.
The university will deploy ChatGPT Education Tool, an OpenAI product built for universities. The university version includes all the capabilities of the publicly-available ChatGPT with enhanced security and privacy, higher message limits and the ability to build custom large language models and share them within the university, the organizations said.
OpenAI can deploy pre-trained models and supplement their knowledge with local healthcare data. The enterprise system will be populated with the health system’s electronic health record data. The university version of ChatGPT does not use the proprietary information to train the public ChatGPT.
UTHealth Houston is using a specially configured version of ChatGPT Edu that is compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) to protect patient data.
OpenAI has a slew of healthcare partners that leverage its tools such as Moderna, Eli Lilly, Sanofi, Color Health, Paradigm, Lifespan, Summer Health and Oscar. OpenAI's venture fund also teamed up with Arianna Huffington's Thrive Global to back a new startup, Thrive AI Health, that aims to build an AI health coach to promote healthier lifestyles.
Xiaoqian Jiang, Ph.D., professor and chair of the Department of Health Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics at UTHealth Houston, said that the solution will improve clinical interactions with patients as well as help students and faculty conduct research.
For providers across UTHealth Houston’s clinical practices, the model could potentially be applied as an assistant or “co-pilot” during the patient encounter. The AI assistant could prompt providers to ask certain questions or follow up on something the patient said during the clinical visit. The model could assist with differential diagnoses, more accurate diagnosis and personalized treatment plans, Jiang said.
The model could also be deployed for backend uses in the health system that could help book patient appointments and manage onboarding procedures, thereby reducing administrative burden and improving efficiency.
UTHealth Houston developed AI guidelines and best practices last year that will help guide the implementation and use of ChatGPT Edu. The system also plans to go a step further to test the algorithms intended for use at the bedside.
“We will establish benchmarks to evaluate internal AI models, comparing their performance on key metrics such as cost, efficiency and accuracy,” Jiang wrote in an email to Fierce Healthcare. “These models will be assessed against external, well-established systems using tools like spider diagrams for a fair comparison. This evaluation will ensure our AI solutions meet rigorous standards before deployment.”
For students at UTHealth Houston, ChatGPT Edu could have a variety of applications. The large language model could generate study material and quizzes to test medical students’ knowledge. The model could also enhance collaborative class projects, Jiang said.
UTHealth Houston thinks the partnership will greatly facilitate research and help faculty and students generate new hypotheses. The university ranks 4th out of universities in Texas that receive federal grant funding from the National Institutes of Health, its website says. The University distributed a total of $309.5 million on research in fiscal year 2023.
“We are excited to offer OpenAI’s powerful tools to our community in a manner that complies with HIPAA and FERPA regulations,” Amar Yousif, vice president and chief information officer at UTHealth Houston, said in a statement. “By using these advanced tools, we aim to develop safe and trusted solutions that improve the patient experience, drive innovative research, streamline operations, and provide state-of-the-art capabilities for data analysis. Ultimately, this will benefit our entire health care and academic ecosystem.”
“This collaboration is a testament to the forward-thinking leadership at UTHealth Houston,” Jiang said in a statement. “By leveraging OpenAI’s cutting-edge technology, we are enhancing our capabilities to develop AI-driven solutions that will significantly impact health care and education. With the strong support and enthusiasm from our visionary leaders and clinical partners, we are advancing our research and clinical practices to ensure the highest standards of privacy and security. This partnership shows our unwavering commitment to innovation and excellence in biomedical informatics.”