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Artificial Intelligence
LLMs in Patient Education: The New Imperative
Can AI transform patient information from forgettable to unforgettable?
Updated January 24, 2025 Reviewed by Davia Sills
Key points
- LLMs transform patient education with personalized, adaptive learning, enhancing engagement.
- Tailored content bridges health disparities, ensuring relevance across literacy levels and cultures.
- Dynamic education can drive behavior change, improving outcomes like medication adherence and readmissions.
Clinicians have long struggled with patient education. Often, materials are simplified to at or below a fifth-grade reading level in an effort to ensure accessibility. Ironically, this approach can render the information ineffective, as it becomes too generic to resonate with anyone.
Patient education is stuck in a static model—one-size-fits-all materials that fail to address the unique needs, literacy levels, and cultural contexts of diverse populations. Today, large language models (LLMs) are poised to redefine how patients engage with health information.
LLMs represent a shift from fixed, standardized information to dynamic, personalized learning experiences. This mirrors broader trends in education, as highlighted in the call to move away from rigid frameworks toward adaptive, learner-centric models. By leveraging the power of LLMs, healthcare can finally transcend the limitations of traditional patient education, creating experiences that are not only accessible but also deeply meaningful to each individual.
Adaptive Learning, Not a “Tear Sheet” of Generic Information
At their core, LLMs excel at personalization. They can synthesize vast amounts of medical information and distill it into accessible, patient-specific insights. Imagine a newly diagnosed diabetic receiving a tailored explanation of their condition, complete with actionable guidance on managing blood sugar, dietary adjustments, and the rationale behind prescribed medications. Unlike generic pamphlets or simplified instructions, this is an interactive and iterative conversational experience that adapts to the patient’s questions, literacy level, and even emotional state.
This level of personalization transforms the educational experience. Patients are no longer passive recipients of information but active participants in their health journeys. By fostering understanding and engagement, LLMs can build trust between patients and providers, encouraging adherence to treatment plans and preventive care measures. This is education as it should be—empowering, inclusive, and impactful.
Education as a Measurable Outcome
The transformative potential of LLM-mediated patient education raises an important question: Should we evaluate its effectiveness as an independent outcome metric? Traditional healthcare metrics like morbidity and mortality rates aren’t studies to capture the nuanced but vital role that education plays in driving behavior change. LLMs, with their ability to deliver adaptive and learner-centric education, may well demand their own metric of clinical efficacy. Of course, these studies would require statistical power to ensure validity.
This metric could assess variables such as short-term drug compliance or longer-term clinical outcomes like hospital readmissions in patients with heart failure. For example, are patients adhering to their medication schedules, and how does LLM-mediated education impact this fundamental clinical concern? By quantifying these dimensions, healthcare systems can better understand and optimize the impact of LLMs on patient care. And here’s a chance for Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, and other tech companies to help establish the capabilities of LLMs in the context of health and wellness.
Bridging Health Disparities
Health disparities are often rooted in unequal access to information. Marginalized communities face barriers such as language differences, limited health literacy, and a lack of trust in the healthcare system. LLMs offer a powerful tool to address these inequities. By generating education in multiple languages, tailoring information to different cultural contexts, and ensuring content is easily understandable, LLMs can help close the gap in health literacy.
For instance, an LLM could generate culturally relevant guidance for managing hypertension in a Hispanic community, incorporating dietary recommendations that respect traditional foods. This approach not only enhances relevance but also fosters a sense of respect and inclusion, making education more engaging and effective.
Moving Beyond Fifth-Grade Level
The default approach of drafting patient education at a fifth-grade reading level reflects a well-intentioned but flawed assumption that simplification ensures accessibility. In practice, this strategy often alienates more literate patients while failing to truly empower those with lower literacy levels. It’s education designed for no one. LLMs provide a way out of this conundrum by tailoring content to each individual’s comprehension level, ensuring that information is both accessible and meaningful.
For example, an LLM could explain the same medical condition in different ways: a straightforward summary for someone with limited health literacy and a more detailed, nuanced explanation for a patient seeking deeper understanding. This adaptability ensures that every patient receives an education that meets them where they are, maximizing engagement and effectiveness.
Catalysts for Behavioral Change
The ultimate goal of patient education is not just to inform but to drive meaningful behavioral change. LLMs, with their ability to engage patients dynamically, are uniquely suited to this challenge. By creating interactive scenarios or simulations, they can help patients visualize the consequences of their choices—for instance, the impact of consistent medication adherence versus missed doses on disease progression.
LLMs can provide ongoing support, offering appointment reminders, tips for lifestyle changes, and real-time answers to follow-up questions. This continuous engagement transforms education from a one-time event into a lifelong process, reinforcing positive behaviors and addressing challenges as they arise.
Reimagining Patient Education
As technology becomes more prominent in medicine, the role of LLMs in patient education cannot be overstated. They represent a fundamental shift from static information delivery to dynamic, adaptive learning experiences. By making education personalized, accessible, and actionable, LLMs empower patients to take ownership of their health like never before.
This transformation is not without its challenges. Issues such as data privacy, ethical use, and equitable access must be addressed to ensure that LLMs effectively serve all patients. Integrating these technologies into existing healthcare workflows will also require thoughtful design and collaboration among technologists, clinicians, and patients.
Nevertheless, the promise of LLM-mediated patient education is undeniable. It is not merely an enhancement of current practices but a reimagining of what education in healthcare can achieve. By leveraging this new tool, healthcare can unlock levels of patient engagement and empowerment, creating a future where education is a measurable and vital component of clinical success. And in doing so, we affirm the simple but profound truth that knowledge is one of the most powerful tools in medicine—when it’s delivered with precision and empathy.
