Using ChatGPT and Generative AI in a HIPAA-Compliant Way

by Alan Brande

As we continue to witness profound technological advancements, it's crucial to understand its opportunities in Healthcare. Generative AI is among the most promising; simultaneously, its challenges must be addressed. That's exactly what I intend to do in this publication.

What is Generative AI

Generative AI utilizes models like ChatGPT to construct intelligible sentences and paragraphs, allowing us to converse with an AI model like a human. In a world that's increasingly digital, this capability is essential. It streamlines processes, enhances user experiences, and reduces the burden of tasks that might have otherwise been time-consuming and challenging to manage.

In the healthcare sector, the value of generative AI cannot be overstated. It can lead to numerous benefits, such as:

  • Streamlining administrative tasks
  • Enabling more effective patient engagement
  • and even facilitating improved medical research and diagnostics.

For instance, AI can potentially assist healthcare providers in synthesizing large amounts of medical literature or summarizing patient records in real time, allowing them to spend more time on direct patient care.

1. Exploring the Potential Applications of ChatGPT in Healthcare

The applications of ChatGPT in healthcare are promising and extensive. It's proven that it can generate a positive impact: from the clinical to the administrative, AI has the potential to reshape the entire industry, making services more efficient and accessible.

Potential for Improvement of AI in Clinical Health

On the clinical side, AI can help with tasks like summarizing patient histories, suggesting possible diagnoses based on symptoms, and even guiding treatment plans. Imagine a world where every medical professional has access to a virtual assistant that can quickly retrieve relevant patient information, allowing them to focus more on their patients.

Potential for Improvement of AI in Administrative Health Matters

From an administrative perspective, ChatGPT could help streamline routine tasks like scheduling appointments, triaging patient calls, and answering general health queries. This can potentially help reduce healthcare costs, improve patient satisfaction, and free up valuable time for healthcare staff.

Lastly, in the realm of patient education and engagement, ChatGPT could provide personalized health information, remind patients about medication regimens, and facilitate digital therapy or wellness programs. We could significantly enhance overall health outcomes and patient engagement by empowering them with knowledge, tools, and accessibility to their medical providers.

2. Is ChatGPT HIPAA Compliant? Understanding PHI and OpenAI's Stance on BAAs

While the potential applications of ChatGPT are undeniably exciting, it's vital to discuss the topic of HIPAA compliance. HIPAA, or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, is a US law that protects patient health information (PHI). Given the sensitive nature of health data, any tool used within the healthcare system must ensure the secure handling of PHI.

OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, does not currently sign Business Associate Agreements (BAAs). A BAA is a contract that ensures that third parties accessing PHI on behalf of a healthcare provider will appropriately safeguard the information. Without such an agreement, the use of ChatGPT for processes involving PHI could be in violation of HIPAA regulations.

Does this mean that ChatGPT cannot be used in a healthcare context? Not necessarily. However, it does mean that certain strategies and precautions need to be adopted to ensure its use doesn't infringe upon HIPAA regulations.

CompliantGPT: a Solution that Addresses the Challenge

With this unprecedented platform, companies can utilize ChatGPT in a HIPAA Compliant way.

The solution acts as a proxy for OpenAI. If messages contain PHI, it will replace them with temporary tokens before sending them to OpenAI. When the response is received, tokens are replaced with the original data to deliver a complete answer.

Note that messages and PHI are not stored on the system, ensuring the privacy and security of your data.

3. Challenges for AI in Health: Hallucinations, Bias, and Errors

In addition to the compliance issue, it's important to be aware of other limitations when using ChatGPT in a healthcare setting:

  1. Hallucinations:
    Despite being an intelligent model, ChatGPT can sometimes generate information that isn't based on its training data, leading to potential inaccuracies.
  2. Potential for bias:
    Since the AI is trained on vast amounts of human-generated text, it can inadvertently reflect and perpetuate biases present in those texts. This is particularly significant in healthcare, where biased information can lead to inappropriate care or health disparities.
  3. Errors:
    ChatGPT, like any AI, can make mistakes. While AI can process and analyze data at incredible speeds, it doesn't have the intuitive understanding or medical judgment that a human healthcare provider possesses. As such, a human expert should always review and contextualize its outputs.

Everything explained above shows how AI applied to health care could be risky. Here, the insight is clear; the key is in the use of technology combined with the expertise of medical professionals.

4. Strategies for Ensuring HIPAA Compliance with ChatGPT

Given the benefits and potential applications of ChatGPT in healthcare, it's worth exploring strategies that can enable its use in a HIPAA-compliant manner to ensure data security in generative AI healthcare.

Anonymizing or de-identifying health data before it's processed by ChatGPT can mitigate the risk of PHI breaches. By stripping away identifiable information, the data can no longer be traced back to a specific individual, allowing it to be handled without violating HIPAA regulations.

An alternative to data anonymization for HIPAA compliance is indeed the use of self-hosted LLMs. By keeping the GPT model on your own secure servers, you avoid having to share patient health information (PHI) outside of your infrastructure. This way, the data remains within your controlled environment, never reaching third-party servers. This approach substantially mitigates risks associated with data breaches, offering an effective strategy for organizations to leverage the power of AI while maintaining stringent HIPAA compliance. However, it’s important to acknowledge that implementing self-hosted LLMs comes with its own challenges.

  1. Training and maintaining such models requires significant computational resources and technical expertise.
  2. Ensuring that these systems are secure and HIPAA-compliant involves meticulous planning and execution. This includes setting up robust data encryption and user authentication protocols and conducting regular security audits.
  3. Developing a reliable and effective LLM involves extensive testing and fine-tuning, a process that can be both time-consuming and resource-intensive.

These complexities underscore the importance of having a skilled team of IT professionals, data scientists, and healthcare experts collaborating closely to ensure the successful implementation of a self-hosted LLM.

Lastly, providing training and education to all healthcare staff using ChatGPT is important. You can further mitigate the chance of HIPAA violations by ensuring they understand the limitations and potential risks associated with using AI.

5. What Does the Future Hold for ChatGPT and Healthcare?

Looking forward, it's clear that AI and healthcare have a shared future to provide global health improvement. And this, for sure, is not just a 2024 trend. While compliance issues currently limit the full utilization of ChatGPT or other generative AI tools, their potential benefits are too significant to ignore.

It's conceivable that going forward, AI developers and regulators will collaborate more closely to address compliance concerns and ethical dilemmas in health. This could involve the development of specialized AI models tailored to the needs and regulations of the healthcare industry. Alternatively, legislative changes could be considered to account for AI's unique challenges and opportunities.

As we look ahead, it's entirely plausible that OpenAI might sign Business Associate Agreements (BAAs) upon request. This could pave the way for their APIs and models, including ChatGPT, to be used in clinical settings without the limitations of handling PHI.

Moreover, as AI continues to evolve and improve, many of the current limitations may be addressed. Improved training methods could reduce biases and hallucinations, while advances in AI interpretability could make these tools more transparent and reliable.

Embracing a Future of AI in Healthcare with Caution and Optimism

In conclusion, while challenges and limitations are associated with using ChatGPT in a healthcare context, the potential benefits are profound. By recognizing and navigating these challenges, we can pave the way for a future where AI plays a pivotal role in advancing healthcare services.

In the end, the advantages explained above are evident and promising:

  • Empower patients with knowledge and tools
  • Enhance patient engagement and experience
  • Facilitate the management of time-consuming operative tasks
  • Streamline processes to improve operational efficiency
  • Provide guidance to professionals on medical treatments to reduce healthcare costs

The journey towards this future must be undertaken with caution. The sensitivity of health data and the importance of providing accurate, unbiased healthcare services mean that any use of AI in this context must be carefully considered and monitored.

Nonetheless, we should be optimistic. With the right strategies and experienced Healthcare software development services, we can ensure that the use of AI in healthcare not only respects patient privacy and upholds HIPAA regulations but also brings about tangible improvements in healthcare delivery and outcomes. It's a future well worth working towards.

At Light-it, we already use Generative Artificial Intelligence in various Healthcare projects and have experience navigating the limitations. Our Innovation Lab is proactively researching and testing these technologies in the digital healthcare software we develop; this is definitely moving forward!​ It is about understanding its potential with caution to enhance people's quality of life. This is ultimately the purpose of every company engaged in the health context.