RRU in the media: Using chatbots to practice difficult conversations
Artificial intelligence is used in most workplaces now, in some form or another. Whether it’s for creative idea generation, writing help, administrative tasks, or something else, AI is fast becoming a necessary skill for the workforce.
Royal Roads University Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies Jaigris Hodson, and co-researchers David Rand from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Heather Lanthorn from Duke University, wrote in The Conversation about how clinicians can use AI chatbots to optimize their conversations around vaccine misinformation, and ultimately improve health outcomes.
Here’s an excerpt from the article:
“Research consistently shows that clinicians can increase vaccine uptake by using better communication strategies. Even brief interventions — such as training in motivational interviewing — have measurable impacts on patient trust and behaviour.
“Chatbots provide an opportunity to deliver this kind of training at scale. In recent work, computational social scientist David Rand and colleagues have demonstrated how AI-based agents can be trained to engage in social conversations and generate responses that effectively persuade.
“These principles can be applied to the clinician–patient setting, allowing professionals to test and refine different ways of engaging with vaccine hesitancy before stepping into real-world conversations.”