Despite the plethora of telehealth applications to assist home-based older adults and healthcare providers, basic messaging and phone calls are still the most common communication methods, which suffer from limited availability, information loss, and process inefficiencies. One promising solution to facilitate patient-provider communication is to leverage large language models (LLMs) with their powerful natural conversation and summarization capability. However, there is a limited understanding of LLMs' role during the communication. We first conducted two interview studies with both older adults (N=10) and healthcare providers (N=9) to understand their needs and opportunities for LLMs in patient-provider asynchronous communication. Based on the insights, we built an LLM-powered communication system, Talk2Care, and designed interactive components for both groups: (1) For older adults, we leveraged the convenience and accessibility of voice assistants (VAs) and built an LLM-powered VA interface for effective information collection. (2) For health providers, we built an LLM-based dashboard to summarize and present important health information based on older adults' conversations with the VA. We further conducted two user studies with older adults and providers to evaluate the usability of the system. The results showed that Talk2Care could facilitate the communication process, enrich the health information collected from older adults, and considerably save providers' efforts and time. We envision our work as an initial exploration of LLMs' capability in the intersection of healthcare and interpersonal communication.

翻译：尽管有大量远程健康应用程序旨在帮助居家老年人和医疗保健提供者，但基本的短信和电话通话仍是最常见的沟通方式，这些方式存在可用性有限、信息丢失和流程效率低下的问题。一个促进医患沟通的有前景方案是利用具备强大自然对话和总结能力的大语言模型（LLMs）。然而，目前对LLMs在沟通中所扮演角色的理解十分有限。我们首先进行了两项访谈研究，分别面向老年人（N=10）和医疗保健提供者（N=9），以了解他们在医患异步沟通中对LLMs的需求和潜在应用机会。基于这些见解，我们构建了一个由LLM驱动的沟通系统Talk2Care，并为两组用户设计了交互组件：（1）针对老年人，我们利用了语音助手（VAs）的便捷性和可及性，构建了一个基于LLM的VA界面，用于高效信息收集。（2）针对医疗保健提供者，我们构建了一个基于LLM的仪表板，用于根据老年人与VA的对话总结并呈现重要的健康信息。我们进一步开展了两项用户研究，评估该系统的可用性。结果表明，Talk2Care能够促进沟通过程，丰富从老年人处收集的健康信息，并显著节省提供者的精力和时间。我们将这项工作视为探索LLMs在医疗与人际沟通交叉领域能力的初步尝试。