“If chatbots are patients’ so-called ‘first touch’ with the health care system, we really need to understand how they experience them and what the effects could be on trust and compassion,” says Annie Moore, a professor of internal medicine, in a university release.
“Many health systems created chatbots as symptom-checkers,” says Associate Professor Matthew DeCamp. “You can go online and type in symptoms such as cough and fever and it would tell you what to do. As a result, we became interested in the ethics around the broader use of this technology.”