Conversational AI employed to teach clinicians empathy

Conversational AI is being used to build virtual patients that will teach medical students how to be empathetic, as part of a University of Auckland research project.

An empathetic consultation is one where the clinician validates the patient’s feelings and develops a treatment plan in partnership with the patient, informed by their individual experiences.

“Empathy leads to better outcomes for the patient — better adherence to the treatment plan. It also reduces stress and burnout for healthcare professionals and improves their job satisfaction,” doctoral candidate Monika Byrne said.

Byrne is currently reviewing existing research and developing the training program, using a model of empathy with elements that can be taught and assessed.

“I think the way empathy works is we learn throughout life how things feel in our bodies,” Byrne said. “Then we build this cognitive library of human experiences and emotions that go with them — what it’s actually like to be in emotional pain, for example, to lose a partner or to fail.”

Byrne is also describing subskills involved in empathetic consults, such as an ability to focus attention and to self-regulate.

Scientists at the University of Florida’s Virtual Experiences Research Group are assisting Byrne to build virtual patients that can converse and express feelings. They appear, as avatars, on a screen and the student can chat with them using a chat function.

Byrne intends to adapt five of their virtual patients for this project to make them suitable for empathy training by­ giving them the ability to talk about and express emotions, ask questions and have preferences.

Using AI will not replace the need to train with actors or real patients but will give students ability to practise engaging with empathy before their clinical placements, save universities money and be engaging for students through gamifying learning.

Another goal is for the virtual patients to be able to express difficult emotions, such as anger and distress. Plus, they will need to teach students how to relate empathetically to people who are very different to themselves, including culturally.

Byrne has completed masters degrees in English, Computer Science, Bioinformatics and Bioengineering and has worked as a software engineer and IT systems/business analyst in the pharma industry and academia. She is collaborating with the University of Auckland’s Speech Science department and its Centre for Medical and Health Science Education to run a pilot and develop the AI before conducting a randomised, controlled trial and publishing the results.

Image credit: Supplied