Are Virtual Assistants Trustworthy for Medicare Information: An Examination of Accuracy and Reliability

Abstract

Abstract Background and Objectives Advances in artificial intelligence (AI)-based virtual assistants provide a potential opportunity for older adults to use this technology in the context of health information-seeking. Meta-analysis on trust in AI shows that users are influenced by the accuracy and reliability of the AI trustee. We evaluated these dimensions for responses to Medicare queries. Research Design and Methods During the summer of 2023, we assessed the accuracy and reliability of Alexa, Google Assistant, Bard, and ChatGPT-4 on Medicare terminology and general content from a large, standardized question set. We compared the accuracy of these AI systems to that of a large representative sample of Medicare beneficiaries who were queried twenty years prior. Results Alexa and Google Assistant were found to be highly inaccurate when compared to beneficiaries’ mean accuracy of 68.4% on terminology queries and 53.0% on general Medicare content. Bard and ChatGPT-4 answered Medicare terminology queries perfectly and performed much better on general Medicare content queries (Bard = 96.3%, ChatGPT-4 = 92.6%) than the average Medicare beneficiary. About one month to a month-and-a-half later, we found that Bard and Alexa’s accuracy stayed the same, whereas ChatGPT-4’s performance nominally decreased, and Google Assistant’s performance nominally increased. Discussion and Implications LLM-based assistants generate trustworthy information in response to carefully phrased queries about Medicare, in contrast to Alexa and Google Assistant. Further studies will be needed to determine what factors beyond accuracy and reliability influence the adoption and use of such technology for Medicare decision-making.