The above research was conducted by a group of pharmacists at Long Island University (USA) from January 2022 to April 2023 for ChatGPT free version of OpenAI company. Accordingly, Associate Professor of Pharmacy Sara Grossman and the research team raised 45 practical questions related to the drug information service of Long Island University School of Pharmacy. Some pharmacists in the group researched and answered 45 questions. Several other pharmacists will review each question and answer. These responses are used as criteria to compare against ChatGPT responses. After that, the research team eliminated 6 questions due to lack of answer documents, leaving 39 questions for ChatGPT to answer.

The results showed that only 10 out of 39 responses from ChatGPT were considered satisfactory based on the criteria set by pharmacists. For the remaining questions, ChatGPT did not answer directly for 11 questions, answered incorrectly for 10 questions, and answered incorrectly or incompletely for 12 questions.

In light of these results, lead researcher Sara Grossman commented that healthcare professionals and patients should be cautious when using ChatGPT to find information related to drugs and anyone using ChatGPT to consult information. Information about the drug should also be verified with other reliable sources.

For each question, researchers asked ChatGPT to provide references so the information could be verified. Only 8 responses had references and all of these documents no longer exist. Notably, researchers asked ChatGPT whether there was an interaction between Pfizer’s COVID-19 treatment drug Paxlovid and the high blood pressure drug verapamil and ChatGPT replied that no interaction was recorded when taking the two drugs. this medicine at the same time. However, Associate Professor Grossman said that in reality, these two drugs can interact with each other and the combined use of Paxlovid and verapamil can cause the patient’s blood pressure to drop very low. She emphasized that if not aware of this interaction, patients may experience unwanted side effects, when in fact they are preventable.

In the study, Ms. Grossman noted that US drug regulators licensed the drug Paxlovid for the first time in December 2021, a few months after the free version of the ChatGPT application was limited to using certain files. data. Thus, many Paxlovid users may not know that the data they access is outdated and the information ChatGPT provides is inaccurate. Ms. Grossman thinks that maybe the paid version of ChatGPT will give better results.

According to Ms. Grossman, the study only gave a quick assessment of the performance of this chatbot from earlier this year and it is possible that the free version of ChatGPT has now been improved, thereby giving better results.