JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has rapidly emerged as a promising tool in healthcare. Despite its growing adoption, how physicians make use of it in medical practice have not been qualitatively studied. Existing literature has largely focused on theoretical applications or experimental validations, with limited insight into real-world physician engagement with GenAI technologies.

Objective:

This study leveraged a fine-grained dataset at the prompt level to quantitatively examine how physicians incorporate GenAI into their clinical and research workflows. The primary objective was to analyze usage patterns over time and across physician demographics. A secondary goal was to assess potential risks to patient privacy arising from physicians’ interactions with GenAI platforms.

Methods:

This study collected 106,942 query-and-answer pairs by 989 physicians between August 29, 2023, and April 16, 2024. We performed topic classification to identify the most prevalent use cases, examining how these use cases evolved over time and across demographics. We also developed sensitivity classifiers to detect personally identifiable information in physicians’ queries to explore the potential privacy breach risks around physicians’ use of GenAI.

Results:

Approximately 40% of the enrolled physicians are female and 80% are between 18 and 56 years old. The majority of them work in clinical departments (68.8%) or medical technology departments (12.8%). Our classification-based quantitative analyses suggest: (1) Physicians use GenAI predominantly for medical research (60.20%) rather than clinical practice (12.25%); (2) Physicians focus more on healthcare-related questions (rising from 60% to 78%) within the first 15% of their query sequence; (3) The use of GenAI differs across physician demographics and features. Female physicians ask a larger proportion of clinical questions [“Female”: 0.154, “Male”:0.108; p<.01] and administration questions [“Female”: 0.027, “Male”:0.018; p<.01] than male physicians; younger physicians pose more clinical questions [ “Age ≤ 25”: 0.146, “Age ∈ (25,40]”: 0.115, “Age > 40”: 0.103; p<.01] but fewer research questions [“Age ≤ 25”: 0.580, “Age ∈ (25,40]”: 0.607, “Age > 40”: 0.664; p<.01] than senior physicians; physicians accessing GenAI via computers ask more research questions [“Computer”: 0.637, “Mobile”: 0.296; p<.01], whereas physicians using mobile devices inquire more clinical questions [“Computer”: 0.107, “Mobile”: 0.264; p<.01]; (4) Only 2.68% of physician prompts contain sensitive information, the majority of which is primarily derived from writing and editing.

Conclusions:

Physicians are actively integrating GenAI into their professional routines, primarily leveraging it for research but also increasingly for clinical support. Usage patterns vary significantly across demographic lines, including gender, age, and device preference. Despite the presence of sensitive information in some prompts, the risk of privacy breaches appears to be low.