Utility of ChatGPT in Pre-vasectomy Counselling in an Office-based Setting

University of Manitoba

Status: Enrolling

Conditions: Vasectomy; Contraception

Treatments: Other: ChatGPT Language Model

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT06009783

HS25978 (H2023:136)

Details and patient eligibility

About

The investigators wish to perform a pilot study at the Manitoba Men's Health Clinic to assess if pre-vasectomy counseling with ChatGPT can safely streamline the consultation process by reducing visit times, while increasing patient satisfaction with the consultation process.

Full description

The release of ChatGPT, a natural language AI chat bot, has recently captured the attention of the general public and medical professionals world-wide. ChatGPT is a conversational AI language model designed by OpenAI that utilizes deep learning techniques to generate human like responses to questions. There has been increasing interest among the medical community on developing new ways to harness this technology to aid medical professionals. New applications have included writing scientific manuscripts, drafting correspondents, as well as testing its ability on standardized medical licensing examinations. ChatGPT was able to perform at or near passing threshold on the United States Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE). Despite ChatGPT demonstrating good medical knowledge, it is still unclear if this translates to real world clinical practice.

Physician burnout is becoming an increasing problem. Per a recent Canadian Urologic Association (CUA) census, burnout was identified in 39% of urologists, with high number of patient visits/week to be cited as a predictor predictive of burnout. That begs the question, can ChatGPT be used for patient counseling and to improve patient flow in one's practice? ChatGPT has been shown to provide effective and safe responses to medical questions and even "curbside" consultations. However its ability to counsel patients in real time has not yet been studied.

As such, the investigators wish to perform a pilot study at the Manitoba Men's Health Clinic to assess if pre-vasectomy counseling with ChatGPT can safely streamline the consultation process by reducing visit times, while increasing patient satisfaction with the consultation process. If the hypothesis provides true, further implementation of ChatGPT in a healthcare practice may work to reduce the burden on health care providers.

There are no predicted adverse events of this study. There are no identified potential harms of this study.

Enrollment: 40 estimated patients

Sex: Male

Ages: 18 to 65 years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Patients undergoing vasectomies interested in participating
• Adult (>18 years old)
• Consenting

Exclusion criteria

• Do not consent, uninterested in participating

Trial design

Primary purpose: Health Services Research

Allocation: Non-Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: Single Blind

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40 participants in 2 patient groups

Intervention arm - ChatGPT

Experimental group

Description:

Patient's interested in participating in the intervention group will be provided a secure ChatGPT account. They will have the opportunity to converse with ChatGPT to ask any potential questions they may have regarding their upcoming vasectomy. Patient's will then be seen for the standard pre-vasectomy consultation.

Treatment:

Other: ChatGPT Language Model

Control arm - no ChatGPT

No Intervention group

Description:

No intervention - standard of care