Jul 2026· WIREs Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery· 0 citations· 64 references
Abstract
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 (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.
Song-Bin Guo, Sui-Xing Zhong, Yixian Ma et al.· International Journal of Sur...· 0 citations
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.
Noah Wright· International Journal of Mod...· 0 citations
A scoping review of 24 PubMed-indexed studies published between 2023 and 2026 was conducted to assess current applications, benefits, limitations, and future directions of LLMs in healthcare.
Antoni Klamka, Paulina Kawalec, Kamil Bronikowski et al.· Quality in Sport· 0 citations
This review provides a structured overview of recent progress in Med-LLMs by examining their major application areas, key challenges, and emerging future directions.
Yuyang Sha, Li Yu, Zejia Lin et al.· Military Medical Research· 0 citations
ChatGPT an advanced natural language processing (NLP) model is gaining attention across diverse healthcare contexts. This study presents a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of 594 publications from the Web of Science database mapping the current research landscape, emerging hotspots, and future directions of ChatGPT in healthcare research. The analysis revealed an annual growth rate of 91.18% underscoring the rapid expansion of scholarly interest in this area. Key themes included its potential applications in clinical decision support, medical education and patient communication, as well as recurring concerns related to misinformation and ethical considerations. The most cited publication in this domain received 741 citations reflecting the substantial influence of early contributions. Although ChatGPT can generate human-like text, its potential roles in supporting diagnostic reasoning, streamlining information workflows and assisting in medical documentation remain speculative and require further empirical validation. This study provides a descriptive foundation to guide future interdisciplinary inquiries into ChatGPT’s evolving role in healthcare.