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：尽管存在大量远程健康应用来协助居家老年人和医疗提供者，但基本的短信和电话仍是最常见的沟通方式，这些方式面临可用性有限、信息丢失和流程效率低下的问题。一种有前景的解决方案是利用大型语言模型（LLMs）的强大自然对话和总结能力来促进医患沟通。然而，目前对LLMs在沟通中的角色理解有限。我们首先与老年人（N=10）和医疗提供者（N=9）分别进行了两项访谈研究，以了解他们在非同步医患沟通中对LLMs的需求和机会。基于这些见解，我们构建了一个基于LLM的沟通系统Talk2Care，并设计了针对这两组用户的交互组件：（1）对于老年人，我们利用语音助手（VAs）的便利性和可访问性，构建了一个基于LLM的VA界面，用于有效收集信息；（2）对于医疗提供者，我们构建了一个基于LLM的仪表板，根据老年人与VA的对话总结并呈现重要的健康信息。我们进一步与老年人和医疗提供者进行了两项用户研究，以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，并显著节省医疗提供者的精力和时间。我们将这项工作视为对LLMs在医疗与人际沟通交叉领域能力的初步探索。