A good eye appointment starts with a good history: what's wrong, when it started, what makes it worse, which medicines the patient takes. In a busy clinic, that conversation often happens in a hurry, and details slip through that a doctor could have used.
The clever bit
Researchers at a Guangzhou eye hospital built an AI interview agent that interviews patients about their symptoms and background before their appointment and writes up a history for the doctor. They then ran a randomized trial comparing it with ophthalmology residents doing the same pre-visit interview. Half the patients were interviewed by the AI agent and half by a resident, chosen at random.
The trial enrolled 172 patients, 86 in each group, and assessors who didn't know which interviewer was used scored each history out of 100. The AI agent's histories scored 17.7 points higher on average. The AI conversations also ran longer, with a median of 11.2 minutes against 3.1 for residents.
Hooray
Patients got a more complete hearing before they ever sat down with the doctor, and the doctor got a fuller picture to start from. The trial's assessors were masked, so they scored the histories without knowing who took them.
What comes next
The history score was designed by the study team, and it's hard to separate the benefit of longer interviews from the AI's questioning style. The trial was at one hospital, in Chinese, in non-emergency care, and it didn't show better health outcomes or faster visits. The paper is peer-reviewed in npj Digital Medicine. The authors declared no competing interests, and the work was supported by public and university grants.