ASHABot: An LLM-Powered Chatbot to Support the Informational Needs of Community Health Workers

arXiv - CS - Human-Computer Interaction Pub Date : 2024-09-17 DOI:arxiv-2409.10913

Pragnya Ramjee, Mehak Chhokar, Bhuvan Sachdeva, Mahendra Meena, Hamid Abdullah, Aditya Vashistha, Ruchit Nagar, Mohit Jain

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Abstract

Community health workers (CHWs) provide last-mile healthcare services but face challenges due to limited medical knowledge and training. This paper describes the design, deployment, and evaluation of ASHABot, an LLM-powered, experts-in-the-loop, WhatsApp-based chatbot to address the information needs of CHWs in India. Through interviews with CHWs and their supervisors and log analysis, we examine factors affecting their engagement with ASHABot, and ASHABot's role in addressing CHWs' informational needs. We found that ASHABot provided a private channel for CHWs to ask rudimentary and sensitive questions they hesitated to ask supervisors. CHWs trusted the information they received on ASHABot and treated it as an authoritative resource. CHWs' supervisors expanded their knowledge by contributing answers to questions ASHABot failed to answer, but were concerned about demands on their workload and increased accountability. We emphasize positioning LLMs as supplemental fallible resources within the community healthcare ecosystem, instead of as replacements for supervisor support.

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ASHABot：由法学硕士驱动的聊天机器人，可满足社区卫生工作者的信息需求

社区保健工作者（CHWs）提供最后一英里的医疗保健服务，但由于医疗知识和培训有限而面临挑战。本文介绍了 ASHABot 的设计、部署和评估。ASHABot 是一个由 LLM 支持、专家在环路中、基于 WhatsApp 的聊天机器人，旨在满足印度社区卫生工作人员的信息需求。通过对卫生保健工作者及其主管的访谈和日志分析，我们研究了影响他们参与 ASHABot 的因素，以及 ASHABot 在满足卫生保健工作者信息需求方面的作用。我们发现，ASHABot 为卫生保健工作者提供了一个私人渠道，让他们可以向主管提出他们犹豫不决的基本敏感问题。卫生保健工作者信任他们在 ASHABot 上获得的信息，并将其视为权威资源。卫生保健工作者的主管通过回答 ASHABot 未能解答的问题来扩展自己的知识，但他们担心工作量的增加和责任的加重。我们强调要将 LLMs 定位为社区医疗生态系统中不可靠的补充资源，而不是主管支持的替代品。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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arXiv - CS - Human-Computer Interaction

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