Combining acute alcohol administration with accelerated prefrontal theta burst stimulation: A pilot study of feasibility and inhibitory control.

Currently, China’s tertiary hospitals are still occupied with a large number of outpatients daily due not only to the ineffective triage of the hierarchical diagnosis and treatment system but also to the ever-increasing population suffering from chronic and age-related diseases. Undoubtedly, this has been hindering the improvement of the current situation of inadequate communication between physicians and patients during outpatient consultations, which in turn prevents the further improvement of the current patient satisfaction and physician-patient relationship. The physician-patient communication in China has received increasing attention over the past decade. China is currently committed to enhancing physician-patient communication and building a harmonious physician-patient relationship, and has proposed to make full use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to improve the medical experience for patients. Previous research has indicated that effective physician-patient communication is closely associated with positive patient outcomes, such as enhanced patient satisfaction and patient safety, and better treatment compliance. Accordingly, it’s of great significance to ameliorate the efficiency and quality of physician-patient communication with the support of AI technologies. With the wider application of AI technologies in the medical fields (e.g., iconography diagnosis) as well as the support of the policy on the digital transformation of the healthcare industry, Shanghai was the first to develop the AI-driven conversational agents (CAs) in outpatient settings of tertiary hospitals in 2021 so as to enhance the physician-patient communication efficiency during outpatient consultations. AI-driven CAs are artificial intelligence programs that are designed to engage in a dialogue with patients in a structured manner via mobile devices. Through the structured interaction with the question-answering agents simulating physicians, patients can detailedly describe and report their own symptoms and medical history before a clinic consultation, and thus, a corresponding structured pre-consultation report is then generated and subsequently delivered to their visit physicians; and accordingly, their physicians rapidly understand their conditions and further carry out a targeted inquiry. This innovative service based on the AI-driven CAs is also known as intelligent pre-consultation in China. Prior studies have indicated that AI-driven CAs can shorten the time needed for history taking, enhance consultation efficiency and thereby improve the health care provision. Accordingly, we reason that the adoption of the AI-driven CAs might improve the consultation process quality between physicians and patients, and thereby improve the physician-patient interaction quality. Obviously, the AI-driven CAs are emerging in China as a potential solution to enhance the physician-patient communication efficiency, and are playing an increasingly crucial role in the delivery of outpatient services.