Large Language Models as Drug Information Providers for Patients

Luca Giordano, Maria Pia di Buono


Abstract
Recently, a significant interest has arisen about the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in medical settings to enhance various aspects of healthcare. Particularly, the application of such models to improve knowledge access for both clinicians and patients seems very promising but still far from perfect. In this paper, we present a preliminary evaluation of LLMs as drug information providers to support patients in drug administration. We focus on posology, namely dosage quantity and prescription, contraindications and adverse drug reactions and run an experiment on the Italian language to assess both the trustworthiness of the outputs and their readability. The results show that different types of errors affect the LLM answers. In some cases, the model does not recognize the drug name, due to the presence of synonymous words, or it provides untrustworthy information, caused by intrinsic hallucinations. Overall, the complexity of the language is lower and this could contribute to make medical information more accessible to lay people.
Anthology ID:
2024.cl4health-1.7
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Patient-Oriented Language Processing (CL4Health) @ LREC-COLING 2024
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Dina Demner-Fushman, Sophia Ananiadou, Paul Thompson, Brian Ondov
Venues:
CL4Health | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
54–63
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.cl4health-1.7
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Luca Giordano and Maria Pia di Buono. 2024. Large Language Models as Drug Information Providers for Patients. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Patient-Oriented Language Processing (CL4Health) @ LREC-COLING 2024, pages 54–63, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Large Language Models as Drug Information Providers for Patients (Giordano & di Buono, CL4Health-WS 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.cl4health-1.7.pdf