Participatory Assessment of Large Language Model Applications in an Academic Medical Center
This work addresses the challenges of deploying LLMs in healthcare for medical institutions, though it is incremental as it focuses on assessment rather than novel solutions.
The study used a participatory approach to identify potential clinical applications of large language models (LLMs) at an academic medical center, assessing their feasibility based on regulatory, ethical, and technical constraints, and found that significant issues like bias and hallucinations must be addressed for ethical and compliant deployment.
Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising performance in healthcare-related applications, their deployment in the medical domain poses unique challenges of ethical, regulatory, and technical nature. In this study, we employ a systematic participatory approach to investigate the needs and expectations regarding clinical applications of LLMs at Lausanne University Hospital, an academic medical center in Switzerland. Having identified potential LLM use-cases in collaboration with thirty stakeholders, including clinical staff across 11 departments as well nursing and patient representatives, we assess the current feasibility of these use-cases taking into account the regulatory frameworks, data protection regulation, bias, hallucinations, and deployment constraints. This study provides a framework for a participatory approach to identifying institutional needs with respect to introducing advanced technologies into healthcare practice, and a realistic analysis of the technology readiness level of LLMs for medical applications, highlighting the issues that would need to be overcome LLMs in healthcare to be ethical, and regulatory compliant.