Artificial intelligence (AI) now plays an unprecedented role across various fields, including medical education, practice, and research. ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, exemplifies this transformative shift. By November 2023, it boasted 100 million weekly users, driven by its human-like text generation capabilities. This versatility is applied across numerous applications, including question-answering, language translation, and text summarisation.
ChatGPT has become a go-to tool for educators, researchers, healthcare professionals, and students alike. In a study published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) on 8 February 2023, researchers explored ChatGPT’s potential as a medical education aide. Surprisingly, they found that ChatGPT scored comparably to a third-year medical student, sparking excitement about its role in shaping the future of medical learning.
To harness this cutting-edge technology, Professor Dr Goh Khang Wen from INTI International University’s Faculty of Data Science and Information Technology (FDSIT), alongside a team of researchers from Malaysia, Yemen, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Indonesia, explored ChatGPT’s potential in education modules on pharmacotherapy for infectious diseases. Their diverse expertise promises fresh insights, humanising AI’s role in education and healthcare.
Their research, titled ‘The Use of ChatGPT for Education Modules on Integrated Pharmacotherapy of Infectious Disease: Educators’ Perspectives,’ addresses questions concerning curriculum development, syllabus design, lecture note preparation, and examination construction.
Prof Goh explained, “We conducted a comprehensive review of medical education literature, prioritising integrating AI technologies into teaching and learning to uncover key themes. We meticulously evaluated how well the ChatGPT model performed in providing answers for education modules on integrated pharmacotherapy of infectious diseases.”
ChatGPT demonstrates considerable promise as an invaluable resource for medical and health sciences educators, particularly in integrated pharmacotherapy of infectious diseases. It underscores ChatGPT’s dependability in assisting educators, especially those new to the field, in curriculum development, syllabus design, lecture note preparation, and examination preparation.
While ChatGPT offers potential benefits in curriculum development for new educators, relying solely on it poses risks. It’s essential to use ChatGPT as a guiding tool and recognise its limitations in curriculum design.
Experts observed that ChatGPT satisfactorily addressed the general need for an integrated pharmacotherapy curriculum and discussed antibiotic resistance effectively but fell short in emphasising the significance of managing infectious diseases. On average, experts rated its appropriateness and accuracy at 65%. Educators are advised to employ ChatGPT with caution as a supplementary resource rather than depending exclusively on its outputs to ensure its effective and responsible utilisation.
“A team of researchers led by Professor Dr Goh Khang Wen from INTI International University’s Faculty of Data Science and Information Technology (FDSIT) has found that incorporating ChatGPT into medical education represents a significant change, offering educators an AI-powered tool to shape the future of both learning and healthcare.
