Arizona hospital system seeing more patients self-diagnose using AI

PHOENIX (AZFamily) — An Arizona hospital system is seeing more people try to find out what’s ailing them using the help of AI. While that may save a trip to the doctor, doing so could cause some significant health issues.

Banner Health’s Poison and Drug Information Center reported a drop in overall call volume but a rise in the severity of those calls. They say that’s because many people waited to call after first getting medical advice from AI programs like Google Gemini and ChatGPT.

“We just have noticed a trend with poison centers, not just our center here in Phoenix, but nationally, that we’re seeing a decrease in total overall calls, which we do attribute to people going to the internet more; however, we have seen about a 50% increase in people going to hospitals and having a major outcome,” said Maureen Roland, director of the Poison and Drug Information Center.

If you have an emergency related to drugs or poisoning, you can call the 24/7 Poison and Drug Information Center at (800) 222-1222 for medical advice.

“It’s a completely free service where they can talk to a medical professional and ask these questions instead of going to the internet, where they might find some bad advice,” Roland said.

She said this process is just as easy as using AI.

“They can call us, and we can talk through whether it’s a medication question or, you know, at our center we’re all registered nurses with physician backup, so we can answer questions on new medications or if they think they may have been exposed to a poison of any sort, we can talk through that with them,” Roland said.

She said to not always trust advice from the internet, but to instead seek out help from a medical professional.

See a spelling or grammatical error in our story? Please click here to report it.

Do you have a photo or video of a breaking news story? Send it to us here with a brief description.

Copyright 2025 KTVK/KPHO. All rights reserved.