Medical Shared Decision Making with a Virtual Agent
Abstract
Shared decision making (SDM) is a process in which patients and clinicians work together to make medical decisions based on clinical evidence that balances risks and expected outcomes with patient preferences and values. SDM has been advocated as the ideal model for patient decision-making in healthcare. However, SDM is rarely used in practice due, in part, to limited availability of healthcare professionals trained in these techniques. In this work, we describe the design of a virtual decision coach to help women participate in SDM about prenatal testing for Down syndrome. In a quasi-experimental evaluation study, participants demonstrated significant increases in knowledge, high levels of satisfaction with their final decision and low levels of decisional conflict and regret, indicating that virtual agents can effectively perform in the role of decision coach and facilitate the implementation of SDM.
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Conversational agents are a promising tool for the advancement of patient-centered care and can support users' involvement in the management of their own health.
“Due to this accessibility, conversational agents are also a promising tool for the advancement of patient-centered care and can support users’ involvement in the management of their own health [17,18].”
From The Effectiveness of Artificial Intelligence Conversational Agents in Health Care: Systematic Review (2020) · cites this paper as [18]
Conversational agents are helping to provide patient-centered care by increasing patients' involvement in their health care and decision making.
“Finally, these agents are helping to provide patient-centered care by increasing the patients’ involvement in their health care and decision making [2,17,18].”
From Effectiveness of Conversational Agents (Virtual Assistants) in Health Care: Protocol for a Systematic Review (2020) · cites this paper as [18]
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“The design of the decision coaching conversation is based on the SDM Model developed by Elwyn et al [18] , which translates the conceptualization of SDM into a practical model that can be used to guide how to do shared decision making in clinical practice.”
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The Effectiveness of Artificial Intelligence Conversational Agents in Health Care: Systematic Review
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- Authors
- Zhang, Z., & Bickmore, T.
- Affiliations
- Northeastern University (US)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2018-11-05
- Pages
- 113-118
- OpenAlex
- W2901869712
- Cited by
- 28
- References
- 41
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 6 · 2024: 3 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 2 · 2021: 3 · 2020: 4 · 2019: 3
- FWCI
- 19.16
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Health Professions › General Health Professions › Patient-Provider Communication in Healthcare
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Health Informatics › Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Social Robot Interaction and HRI
- Keywords
- shared decision-making, virtual agents, prenatal testing, Down syndrome, patient decision-making, decisional conflict, regret, patient knowledge, women's health, clinical decision support
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