Real World Utility of ChatGPT in Pre-vasectomy Counselling in an Office-based Setting

The release of ChatGPT, a natural language AI chat bot, has recently captured the attention of the general public and medical professionals world-wide. ChatGPT is a conversational AI language model designed by OpenAI that utilizes deep learning techniques to generate human like responses to questions. There has been increasing interest among the medical community on developing new ways to harness this technology to aid medical professionals. New applications have included writing scientific manuscripts, drafting correspondents, as well as testing its ability on standardized medical licensing examinations. ChatGPT was able to perform at or near passing threshold on the United States Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE). Despite ChatGPT demonstrating good medical knowledge, it is still unclear if this translates to real world clinical practice.

Physician burnout is becoming an increasing problem. Per a recent Canadian Urologic Association (CUA) census, burnout was identified in 39% of urologists, with high number of patient visits/week to be cited as a predictor predictive of burnout. That begs the question, can ChatGPT be used for patient counseling and to improve patient flow in one's practice? ChatGPT has been shown to provide effective and safe responses to medical questions and even "curbside" consultations. However its ability to counsel patients in real time has not yet been studied.

As such, the investigators wish to perform a pilot study at the Manitoba Men's Health Clinic to assess if pre-vasectomy counseling with ChatGPT can safely streamline the consultation process by reducing visit times, while increasing patient satisfaction with the consultation process. If the hypothesis provides true, further implementation of ChatGPT in a healthcare practice may work to reduce the burden on health care providers.

There are no predicted adverse events of this study. There are no identified potential harms of this study.