Mayo Clinic Launches AI Chatbot for Doctors
/By Crystal Lindell
If you’ve ever shared with a doctor medical information or advice you found online, there’s a good chance they were a bit annoyed or defensive. After years spent in medical school and/or residency, many doctors dislike anything that questions their expertise – especially if it came from the Internet.
Which makes a new artificial intelligence (AI) program launched by the Mayo Clinic all the more interesting.
Starting this month, the world renowned medical center is launching a new chatbot called the Clinical Decision Support (CDS) solution. The AI-driven chatbot is not for patients, but for the Mayo Clinic’s own doctors and healthcare providers. It will cover more than 35 medical specialties and have access to patients’ electronic health records, providing “industry-standard medical information” that can “help clinicians reason through complex cases.”
"Clinicians have access to a vast amount of medical knowledge, but finding relevant information for individualized patient care takes valuable time," says Maneesh Goyal, chief operating officer of Mayo Clinic Platform.
"With this new solution, we are bringing trusted Mayo Clinic knowledge directly into the clinical workflow so clinicians can spend less time searching for information across multiple resources and more time focused on patient care."
In other words, Mayo Clinic doctors will be doing the same thing patients do – searching for answers to their health questions.
The Mayo Clinic clarified that its doctors will still be responsible for all final medical decisions, regardless of their use of AI.
"The CDS solution is designed to assist healthcare professionals as they make patient care decisions; it does not replace clinical judgment," said Gelareh Zadeh, MD, chair of the Department of Neurosurgery at Mayo Clinic in Rochester. "Mayo Clinic physicians have provided feedback on the different tools to ensure the solution supports clinicians and reflects Mayo Clinic's approach to patient care."
A press release says the chatbot will be constantly evaluated for “safety, effectiveness, privacy, security and clinical value, with appropriate human oversight and ongoing monitoring.”
As a patient, I’m hopeful that Mayo Clinic would only use an AI chatbot if they felt comfortable with its accuracy and security. But as an AI user, I’m skeptical.
Interestingly, the Mayo Clinic itself shared an article in April that asked, "Can you trust AI for health advice?" The answer they gave is essentially no, with five reasons cited:
Diagnosing and treating illness is too complex for a machine
AI can be wrong, even when it sounds confident
AI-created information may be biased
AI spreads misinformation
People and AI don't communicate well together
Mayo Clinic providers would be wise to keep those five cautions in mind as they use their own chatbot.
PNN has published multiple stories about the dangers of AI in medical care. One recent article was about a woman who used ChatGBT for advice on how to taper off her seizure medication. The advice she received may have led to her death.
We also published a warning to older adults about how they need to be cautious about taking health advice from chatbots.
"Using AI for health information can be particularly fraught because chatbots can be so helpful in explaining complex medical information, but also risky if users automatically trust the responses they receive,” warned Robin Brewer, PhD, an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan.
The hope is that the Mayo Clinic’s own AI chatbot will be more accurate than ChatGPT, but it will take time and usage to reveal if that’s true.
My other concern is that providers will start to overly rely on the AI system, and not use their own clinical knowledge for context or to fact check it.
A 2025 study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that people who relied on ChatGPT to write essays had lower brain activity than those who used their own intelligence. Those who used AI alone became dependent on it and struggled when asked to perform tasks on their own.
Time will tell how Mayo Clinic’s AI chatbot will perform and how accurate it will be. Let’s just hope no patients get hurt while they figure it out.
