By Alexis Kayser
Healthcare Editor
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Watch the full webinar, "Outdoing Dr. Google: How to Answer Patients' Questions Before the Internet Does" above.
Health systems have been betting on AI as a way to reduce doctor burnout. But at a recent Newsweek event, physician leaders agreed that new technologies could also lessen "patient burnout"—and even give new insight into the under-discussed phenomenon.
Dr. Atiq Bhatti, the faculty administrator and clinical research operations lead in the department of medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School and Virginia Health Sciences, raised the issue to an audience of hospital and health tech stakeholders at the March 5 Newsweek webinar, "Outdoing Dr. Google: How to Answer Patients' Questions Before the Internet Does.”
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Bhatti and his fellow panelists—Dr. Bridget Duffy, co-chair of the PatientAI Collaborative, Dr. Tanvi Jayaraman, the clinical lead of Health AI at Oura and Dr. Mark Mabus, the chief medical informatics officer and senior vice president of electronic health records at Parkview Health in Indiana—had been discussing how to incorporate patient-facing AI tools into clinical care workflows without overwhelming physicians. Speakers and audience members also expressed concerns about patients using AI and online search engines to seek medical information that is rarely vetted by an expert.
Then, Bhatti took the conversation in a different direction.
“We have always talked about ambient tools for burnout of the physicians,” he said. “Let's talk about the burnout of a patient.”
The information that doctors provide them is often overwhelming and riddled with complex medical terminology, Bhatti continued. Appointments are usually too brief to address all of a patient’s questions and concerns, leading them to consult other sources that are available 24/7: ChatGPT, Reddit forums, TikTok reels.
That public desire to seek information online—even if it might be inaccurate—points to “a design failure in our health care system,” Bhatti said. “It’s not a patient behavior problem...they have an absolute right to look for that information.”
Duffy, who also served as the nation’s first chief experience officer at Cleveland Clinic, agreed with Bhatti’s assessment. It’s common to see, “50 sheets of meaningless paper handed to the patient at discharge,” she added, with no support to help them make sense of the notes.
She nodded to solutions like Vital, a platform that uses AI to explain discharge instructions in digestible terms. But there are countless opportunities for more automation and innovation that can make patients’ lives easier—for example, tools that match patients with expert clinicians in their area.
At Parkview Health, efforts to improve the patient experience through technology are already underway. Parkview is the only health system in the U.S. to achieve Epic’s seven-diamond status, an honor reserved for systems with the highest levels of patient engagement and MyChart utilization.
“We take Epic's agentic AI called Emmie, which integrates within MyChart, live this month,” Mabus said, “which opens up a whole new world of tools beyond what we already have to interact with patients all along their care journeys, sending them little daily updates on their care."
“Making this whole patient experience connected, even when you're not in the health system...that just opens up so many more possibilities for our patients to improve their overall wellness,” Mabus said.
Direct-to-consumer companies like Oura are also working to answer patient health queries with reliable information, according to Jayaraman. Last year, they launched Oura Advisor, a feature that allows users to chat with a large language model about their biometrics. The AI model is integrated with users’ wearable devices, so it can provide “tailored” recommendations based on their own data patterns.
“We really are rooting a lot of our advice for our members in their N-of-1 data,” Jayaraman said. “And I think that having this kind of longitudinal signal in between doctor visits is really valuable for the average patient.”
Oura has sold over 5 million rings, she added—an indication that “people really see the value in understanding their bodies and their biometric signals, and people are itching to figure out why things are happening.”
The four speakers—all medical doctors, themselves—agreed that guardrails are necessary to ensure that AI-generated health information is safe and accurate. But rather than scolding patients for typing their symptoms into ChatGPT, or writing off self-diagnoses that were assisted by the internet, clinicians should meet patients with understanding.
After all, everyone is a patient at some point, Duffy said. And many know the stress of receiving a frightening result when the doctor is off-call. She still remembers the “panic” when her brother called her from the side of the road after getting an alert, while driving, that his biopsy was positive for cancer.
The doctor hadn’t reviewed the results before they were sent to her brother’s phone. In these moments, it’s understandable why patients take to Google to try to resolve those “what-ifs.”
“Patients should not learn from an app that they have cancer,” Duffy said, when asked what motivated her to create guidelines for clinically sound, patient-facing AI tools.
Until those guidelines are in place, physicians should resist the urge to cringe when patients lean on ChatGPT, the speakers agreed. Instead, that curiosity should be met with compassion.
This event was part of a series of Newsweek webinars that will take place throughout 2026, addressing the most critical issues facing health care—including financial pressures, workforce strain, rapid technological change and shifting patient demands.
Click here to register for Newsweek's March 17 webinar, "Leveraging Technology to Solve the ED Capacity Crisis," featuring leaders from Sentara Health, Phoenix Children’s and Navvis.
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