Large Language Models in Medicine: Opportunities, Limitations, and Future Directions – A Scoping Review

Large Language Models in Medicine: Opportunities, Limitations, and Future Directions

A roadmap for medical large language models: a review of foundations, applications, and challenges

This review provides a structured overview of recent progress in Med-LLMs by examining their major application areas, key challenges, and emerging future directions.

Large Language Model: Future of Healthcare Research With Challenges

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into healthcare is poised to revolutionize various aspects of medical practice, including clinical decision‐making, patient care, and medical research. This review explores the applications of LLMs such as ChatGPT‐3, ChatGPT‐4, and BERT in healthcare, focusing on their potential to enhance disease diagnosis, treatment planning, and personalized care. The paper presents a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of the growing body of research, highlighting key trends, influential authors, institutions, and geographical contributions. Despite their promise, significant challenges remain, including model accuracy, data privacy, ethical concerns, and the need for domain‐specific fine‐tuning. This review examines the moral and technical challenges associated with deploying LLMs in healthcare, including biases, a lack of transparency, and issues related to model interpretability. The paper further emphasizes the importance of robust frameworks for ensuring ethical usage. It proposes future research directions to address these challenges, including the development of specialized healthcare models, enhanced transparency, and improved integration into clinical workflows. Ultimately, this review aims to inform healthcare professionals, researchers, and policymakers about the transformative potential of LLMs in healthcare while underscoring the critical issues that must be overcome for their widespread adoption. This article is categorized under: Application Areas > Health Care Fundamental Concepts of Data and Knowledge > Big Data Mining Technologies > Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Models in Healthcare: Opportunities and Ethical Challenges

A thorough review of the developments in LLM technologies, their uses in clinical and administrative settings, as well as their ethical considerations are reviewed to suggest a conceptual structure for responsible implementation that will ensure both technological innovation and patient safety, as well as regulatory compliance and ethical health care practices.

Large language models in clinical and healthcare scenarios: a global informatics analysis

Large language models (LLMs) are gradually evolving from text generators into cognitive interfaces and decision-making infrastructure that can be integrated into clinical systems. Although LLMs have demonstrated tremendous potential in retrieving evidence, structuring medical records, and facilitating clinician-patient communication, their clinical translation still faces systemic challenges in the highly heterogeneous, high-risk, and strictly regulated field of healthcare. This paper aims to utilize bibliometric methods to analyze the current global research landscape and trends regarding LLMs in clinical and healthcare scenarios. Furthermore, it proposes a systematic framework for future research directions, with the goal of providing more actionable guidance for subsequent research and clinical translation pathways in this field. Combining the results of global informatics analysis with relevant research advances, this paper conducts a comprehensive analysis of evaluation methods, deployment processes, and governance strategies for LLMs in the healthcare field, focusing on three key issues: model version drift, multilingual external validation, and prompt injection security governance. Future research on LLMs in the healthcare field should shift its focus from merely demonstrating model performance to building a closed-loop system of clinical evidence and governance that is reproducible, monitorable, auditable, and explainable. Through model drift governance, multilingual external validation, and system-level security governance, it is possible to enhance the models’ long-term reliability, generalization fairness, and the controllability and accountability of their deployment, respectively. On this basis, LLM applications may be cautiously expanded from low-risk, reviewable tasks to medical education, clinical decision support, and real-world healthcare workflows.

Applications, Challenges, and Future Directions of Large Language Models in Health Care Communication: Scoping Review

Abstract Background Effective health care communication is crucial in the medical field. However, effective communication in clinical practice still faces numerous obstacles, and large language models (LLMs) offer various possibilities for improving the quality of medical communication. To date, there are no published reviews on the use of LLMs in health care communication. Objective This review sought to summarize the applications and challenges of LLMs in health care communication and to identify directions for future research. Methods A comprehensive literature search was conducted in PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, and the Cochrane Library from January 2018 to November 2025. The search and selection process followed the PRISMA-ScR (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews) guideline and the PRISMA-S (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses literature search extension) checklist. Eligible studies used LLMs to facilitate health care communication among the public, patients, and clinicians. Following rigorous data extraction and cross-checking, we conducted a quantitative analysis of characteristics of the included literature. Furthermore, using communication accommodation theory as a framework, we identified application patterns of LLMs in health care communication and summarized current challenges and future directions. Results Ninety-six studies were included in this review, all published between 2023 and 2025, summarizing 4 patterns of LLM application in health care communication: transforming medical information (n=30), facilitating dynamic interaction (n=38), empowering communication capabilities (n=10), and optimizing clinical workflows (n=18). The role of LLMs in health care communication is undergoing a paradigm shift from “static information processing” to “dynamic intelligent interaction.” Although they show great promise for practical applications, current evaluation methods and dimensions exhibit significant heterogeneity. Furthermore, LLMs still face multiple challenges in their practical application in health care communication, including technical reliability issues, social trust and adoption, interaction and access barriers, and clinical integration challenges. Conclusions Unlike previous studies that merely touched upon the challenges and future directions, this scoping review uses communication accommodation theory to systematically map the application patterns and developmental landscape of LLM-mediated health care communication. Health care communication powered by LLMs holds significant innovation potential and is currently still in the early stages of rapid development. Future research should focus on optimizing model performance, strengthening ethical governance frameworks, enhancing human-machine collaboration models, and ensuring responsible application of LLMs in health care through rigorous empirical validation.