AI, Informed Consent & Medical Malpractice

The legal requirement that a patient give “informed consent” prior to receiving medical care is designed to ensure patients understand the terms of the treatment they’ll be receiving – making it critical in medical malpractice cases and vital to patients’ rights.

But many surgical consent forms are filled with complex legal and medical jargon, making it difficult for the average person to know what exactly they’re agreeing to. Researchers have proposed an innovative and collaborative approach between artificial intelligence (AI) and human experts to improve these forms.

The Study

Researchers combined AI (specifically GPT-4) with reviews from medical and legal experts to enhance readability of consent forms. The study processed forms from 15 academic medical centers using GPT-4, corroborated with experts reviewing the condensed forms to ensure legal and medical accuracy was maintained.

Results and Significance

AI-processed forms showed significant improvements:

Reading time: Reduced from 3 minutes 15 seconds to 2.42 minutes.
Word count: Decreased from 651 to 483.
Sentence complexity: Words per sentence dropped from 21.6 to 19.
Passive voice usage: Decreased from 38.4% to 20%.

Readability improved from a college freshman level to an 8th-grade level. GPT-4-generated forms for specific procedures achieved a 6th-grade reading level and passed expert reviews.

Implications for Medical Malpractice Victims

Patients will always benefit from clearer and more succinct consent forms. It should never be forgotten that the purpose of a consent form is not for the legal protection of the medical provider, but to ensure patients understand the medical care they are about to receive, to ensure a patient has in fact authorized the medical provider to administer medical care, and ultimately, to improve patient safety. This most recent study regarding AI-human collaboration for the creation of consent forms shows promise for achieving those ends, something that will benefit both patients and healthcare providers alike.

Importantly, this study also stressed the importance that patients receive a combination of medical and legal expertise, something CHH is uniquely qualified to offer our clients.

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SOURCES

Ali, R. (2024). Bridging the literacy gap for surgical consents: an AI-human expert collaborative approach. NPJ Digital Medicine.


Medical Malpractice Reform + Medical Research

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