2021: Digital Human Cardiac Coach “Meds” Conversation
Digital Human Cardiac Coach in a conversation about meds with Allan Johnson patient #1
“Meds Conversation: Key Messages for Doctor & Pharmacist Follow-up”
This is an extract from the medications Q&A in the Digital Human Cardiac Coach corpus.
This conversation is not diagnosis or treatment. This conversation is co-designed to help address the impact of health illiteracy and isolation.
Medications non-adherence is a “wicked problem” because it results in poor patient health, lower quality of life and even repeat cardiac events and admissions. This is the sort of conversation that can happen after leaving hospital.
From our “Co-Design for AI ©” methodology, this real life conversation is part of the patient journey of modules of conversation topics, co-designed to reduce the impact of health illiteracy and support the patient in their connection with their healthcare team.
The transcript of this conversation can provide valuable information to the healthcare team and pharmacist for follow-up patient education and support.
The questions (intents) we used are based on years of R&D including in the cardiac rehabilitation setting, patient forums globally, peer reviewed research and general patient education also sourced globally.
We have developed and loaded a large number of synonyms (against entities) so that the patient can ask questions at the highest level – meds, drugs, pills, tablets etc; the medication type level – statin, beta blockers etc and the brand level – Lipitor etc. and still get the correct response.
In this conversation, the patient not only asks questions, but also makes statements a number of times. In both the question interaction and statement interaction, the Coach is able to infer intent and provide information in a natural contextual flow.
This conversation also demonstrates the capability for the Digital Human Cardiac Coach to set diary reminders and send emails.
There needs to be a certain amount of repetition of message to support behavioural adaptation, for the patient to follow-up with the doctor/pharmacist. Reinforcement and encouragement is important for informed patient action.
No AI can nor should answer patient questions about the thousands of conditions and medications pertaining to any chronic condition. (This would be a different digital human role – a digital human instructor for health professionals for example.) Health illiteracy of the patient receiving such information means that they are unable to comprehend it.
The role of the Digital Human Cardiac Coach is to help reduce the impact of health illiteracy and isolation, by providing support via natural contextual conversations and assisting with lifestyle questions that dominate patient forums – such as travelling with meds - so the patient maintains connection with their healthcare team.
In time, further democratisation, localisation and co-design will see the emergence of other personas, not just young female personas, to provide patient choice and to better reflect the community served.
We will continue to publish the Digital Human Cardiac Coach conversations to democratise this innovation.
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The corpus content and "Co-Design for AI"© methodology for the digital human was our own IP as published for free on GitHub.
The digital human was hosted by Trulience using their free trial licence. We built the Agent in Google Dialogflow using their free ES license and their ES Console. We created the Agent on the Google Dialogflow US server so that we could use the beta Knowledge Base functionality. This enabled us to upload our existing intents and responses via a csv file.
Trulience provide simple and clear instructions in their documentation on how to integrate a Google Dialogflow Agent with Trulience. This involved creating a Google Cloud Platform Service Account and JSON key from our Agent. This only took a few minutes and it worked first time. We used the base Trulience expression mark up as provided.
The real life interaction between Allan Johnson and Coach was recorded on a MacBook Pro with Trulience running in Google Chrome. This is not a marketing video.
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