Health Professions Orientations

"Developers and vendors of large language models (“LLMs”) — such as ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Microsoft’s Bing at the forefront—can be subject to Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (“HIPAA”) when they process protected health information (“PHI”) on behalf of the HIPAA covered entities. In doing so, they become business associates or subcontractors of a business associate under HIPAA."

"By law, patients have immediate access to discharge notes in their medical records. Technical language and abbreviations make notes difficult to read and understand for a typical patient. Large language models (LLMs [eg, GPT-4]) have the potential to transform these notes into patient-friendly language and format."

"A federal appeals court recently rejected a lawsuit that claimed that a hospital violated patients’ privacy by sharing electronic health record (EHR) data with Google for medical artificial intelligence (AI) development.1 This lawsuit provides crucial insight into legal issues hospitals may face if they share EHR data with for-profit companies, even if these data do not explicitly identify individual patients."