Medscape launches genAI clinical support tool

 Medscape has joined the ranks of companies offering a generative AI chatbot to support clinical decision-making and help ease doctor workload.

The Medscape AI tool has been co-developed with clinicians and will draw on the WebMD subsidiary's heritage in peer-reviewed papers, with more than 400 titles, as well as its news articles and other information sources for clinicians and medical scientists. According to the company, it will provide "fast, accurate, and trustworthy medical insights."

It joins a small but growing number of GenAI platforms promising to provide clinical support to healthcare professionals, including OpenEvidence, Doximity GPT, and Medwise AI.

While these tools are starting to gain use among the medical profession, there is still quite a lot of scepticism about their clinical credibility, with a survey last year finding that around half (47%) of doctors in the UK would not be comfortable using them to make treatment decisions for their patients. Many will also verify responses with more traditional sources, such as UpToDate.

Medscape asserts that its new platform will help address those reservations as it draws on its proprietary, up-to-date journal and news content, supported by "weekly editorial oversight," and will not draw on any unverified material from the open internet.

"The things I am looking for when I'm interacting with tools like this are reliability and verifiability – having verifiable information increases my ability to trust what I am seeing," said F Perry Willson, a nephrologist at Yale New Haven Hospital in the UK.

"Everything that Medscape AI says is going to be tied back to something that you can click on and see the primary source," he added. "A model like this saves me time, which means I have more time to take care of my patients, and get home and spend time with my family."

A report commissioned by the UK General Medical Council and published last November found that, overall, doctors believe that GenAI and diagnostic and decision support systems could improve efficiency.

They identified a range of risks, including bias, issues with transparency, and concerns about over-reliance on these technologies in the future, but also felt confident they could mitigate these risks in their own practice.

According to Medscape, the new platform will be available free to its more than 13 million members, and is available "in any language, in any country, and in any clinic." It has also promised to refine Medscape AI, with personalisation and other new features due to be added next year.

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