Ask Patients with Patience: Enabling LLMs for Human-Centric Medical Dialogue with Grounded Reasoning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Zhu, Jiayuan, Pan, Jiazhen, Liu, Yuyuan, Liu, Fenglin, Wu, Junde
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Zhu, Jiayuan
Pan, Jiazhen
Liu, Yuyuan
Liu, Fenglin
Wu, Junde
author_facet Zhu, Jiayuan
Pan, Jiazhen
Liu, Yuyuan
Liu, Fenglin
Wu, Junde
contents The severe shortage of medical doctors limits access to timely and reliable healthcare, leaving millions underserved. Large language models (LLMs) offer a potential solution but struggle in real-world clinical interactions. Many LLMs are not grounded in authoritative medical guidelines and fail to transparently manage diagnostic uncertainty. Their language is often rigid and mechanical, lacking the human-like qualities essential for patient trust. To address these challenges, we propose Ask Patients with Patience (APP), a multi-turn LLM-based medical assistant designed for grounded reasoning, transparent diagnoses, and human-centric interaction. APP enhances communication by eliciting user symptoms through empathetic dialogue, significantly improving accessibility and user engagement. It also incorporates Bayesian active learning to support transparent and adaptive diagnoses. The framework is built on verified medical guidelines, ensuring clinically grounded and evidence-based reasoning. To evaluate its performance, we develop a new benchmark that simulates realistic medical conversations using patient agents driven by profiles extracted from real-world consultation cases. We compare APP against SOTA one-shot and multi-turn LLM baselines. The results show that APP improves diagnostic accuracy, reduces uncertainty, and enhances user experience. By integrating medical expertise with transparent, human-like interaction, APP bridges the gap between AI-driven medical assistance and real-world clinical practice.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_07143
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Ask Patients with Patience: Enabling LLMs for Human-Centric Medical Dialogue with Grounded Reasoning
Zhu, Jiayuan
Pan, Jiazhen
Liu, Yuyuan
Liu, Fenglin
Wu, Junde
Computation and Language
The severe shortage of medical doctors limits access to timely and reliable healthcare, leaving millions underserved. Large language models (LLMs) offer a potential solution but struggle in real-world clinical interactions. Many LLMs are not grounded in authoritative medical guidelines and fail to transparently manage diagnostic uncertainty. Their language is often rigid and mechanical, lacking the human-like qualities essential for patient trust. To address these challenges, we propose Ask Patients with Patience (APP), a multi-turn LLM-based medical assistant designed for grounded reasoning, transparent diagnoses, and human-centric interaction. APP enhances communication by eliciting user symptoms through empathetic dialogue, significantly improving accessibility and user engagement. It also incorporates Bayesian active learning to support transparent and adaptive diagnoses. The framework is built on verified medical guidelines, ensuring clinically grounded and evidence-based reasoning. To evaluate its performance, we develop a new benchmark that simulates realistic medical conversations using patient agents driven by profiles extracted from real-world consultation cases. We compare APP against SOTA one-shot and multi-turn LLM baselines. The results show that APP improves diagnostic accuracy, reduces uncertainty, and enhances user experience. By integrating medical expertise with transparent, human-like interaction, APP bridges the gap between AI-driven medical assistance and real-world clinical practice.
title Ask Patients with Patience: Enabling LLMs for Human-Centric Medical Dialogue with Grounded Reasoning
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.07143