Towards conversational assistants for health applications: using ChatGPT to generate conversations about heart failure
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
May 6, 2025
Abstract
We explore the potential of ChatGPT (3.5-turbo and 4) to generate
conversations focused on self-care strategies for African-American heart
failure patients -- a domain with limited specialized datasets. To simulate
patient-health educator dialogues, we employed four prompting strategies:
domain, African American Vernacular English (AAVE), Social Determinants of
Health (SDOH), and SDOH-informed reasoning. Conversations were generated across
key self-care domains of food, exercise, and fluid intake, with varying turn
lengths (5, 10, 15) and incorporated patient-specific SDOH attributes such as
age, gender, neighborhood, and socioeconomic status. Our findings show that
effective prompt design is essential. While incorporating SDOH and reasoning
improves dialogue quality, ChatGPT still lacks the empathy and engagement
needed for meaningful healthcare communication.
