Expert assessment of ChatGPT’s ability to generate illness scripts: an evaluative study

An illness script is a specific script format geared to represent patient-oriented clinical knowledge organized around enabling conditions, faults (i.e., pathophysiological process), and consequences. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) stands out as an educational aid in continuing medical education. The effortless creation of a typical illness script by generative AI could help the comprehension of key features of diseases and increase diagnostic accuracy. No systematic summary of specific examples of illness scripts has been reported since illness scripts are unique to each physician.

This study investigated whether generative AI can generate illness scripts.

We utilized ChatGPT-4, a generative AI, to create illness scripts for 184 diseases based on the diseases and conditions integral to the National Model Core Curriculum in Japan for undergraduate medical education (2022 revised edition) and primary care specialist training in Japan. Three physicians applied a three-tier grading scale: “A” denotes that the content of each disease’s illness script proves sufficient for training medical students, “B” denotes that it is partially lacking but acceptable, and “C” denotes that it is deficient in multiple respects.

By leveraging ChatGPT-4, we successfully generated each component of the illness script for 184 diseases without any omission. The illness scripts received “A,” “B,” and “C” ratings of 56.0% (103/184), 28.3% (52/184), and 15.8% (29/184), respectively.

Useful illness scripts were seamlessly and instantaneously created using ChatGPT-4 by employing prompts appropriate for medical students. The technology-driven illness script is a valuable tool for introducing medical students to key features of diseases.