Outpatient reception via collaboration between nurses and a large language model: a randomized controlled trial

Reception is an essential process for patients seeking medical care and a critical component influencing the healthcare experience. However, current communication systems rely mainly on human efforts, which are both labor and knowledge intensive. A promising alternative is to leverage the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to assist the communication in medical center reception sites. Here we curated a unique dataset comprising 35,418 cases of real-world conversation audio corpus between outpatients and receptionist nurses from 10 reception sites across two medical centers, to develop a site-specific prompt engineering chatbot (SSPEC). The SSPEC efficiently resolved patient queries, with a higher proportion of queries addressed in...