Description
Accessing patients' social needs is a critical challenge at emergency departments (EDs). However, most EDs do not have extra staff to administer screeners, and without personnel administration, response rates are low especially for low health literacy patients. To facilitate engagement with such low health literacy patients, we designed a chatbot –- HarborBot – for social needs screening. Through a study with 30 participants, where participants took a social needs screener both via a traditional survey platform and HarborBot, we found that the two platforms resulted in comparable data (equivalent in 87% of the responses). We also found that while the high health literate participants preferred the traditional survey platform because of efficiency (allowing participants to proceed at their own pace), the low health literate participants preferred HarborBot as it was more engaging, personal, and more understandable. We conclude with a discussion on the design implications for chatbots for social needs screening.
Learning Objective: After participating in this session, the learner should be better able to:
- Understand the challenges faced by ED departments regarding social needs screening of low health literacy patients.
- Learn how a chat-based conversational approach can be used in ED settings to perform more engaging and understandable screening process for low health literacy patients.
- Understand the advantages and challenges of using a conversational approach over traditional survey-based tools.
Authors:
Rafal Kocielnik (Presenter)
University of Washington
Elena Agapie, University of Washington
Alexander Argyle, University of Washington
Dennis Hsieh, Harbor-UCLA Medical Center
Kabir Yadav, Harbor-UCLA Medical Center
Breena Taira, Olive View–UCLA Medical Center
Gary Hsieh, University of Washington
Presentation Materials: