Developing Guidelines for Implementing Intelligent Agents

Developing Guidelines for Implementing Intelligent Agents to Improve Primary Care Access for Foreign Residents in Germany

The Master’s Thesis aims to create guidelines for the development of an AI conversational agent helping to improve primary health access in Germany using Design Science Research Methodology for Information System.

Advances in artificial intelligence, particularly in conversational agents (CA), hold significant promise for healthcare. Recent studies emphasize their potential to enhance access for vulnerable groups. Tseng et al. (2023) identify two major barriers to primary healthcare for migrant workers in Taiwan: unfamiliarity with the system and language barriers. Similar issues arise in Germany, where services are predominantly in German (Müller et al., 2022). These barriers undermine patient and provider satisfaction, healthcare quality, and safety (Al Shamsi et al., 2020). Foreign residents report worse health outcomes, greater unmet needs, higher reliance on costly emergency care, and negative care experiences, increasing system-wide costs (Schneider et al., 2015).

To address the mentioned shortcomings, this master’s thesis aims to explore a role of conversational agents in improving health access in Germany. We aim to understand pain points of the underserved group and work closely with the natural language and health industry experts to understand the ways how CA can become a feasible tool in increasing access to healthcare. Based on the interviews, we intend to draw contextual key takeaways to create a CA applicable for the context of the German healthcare system.

Project Outline

The goal of this thesis is to create guidelines for future developers and researchers to create a conversational agent helping patients to improve access to primary healthcare. In the design process we will collect insights using surveys and semi-structured qualitative interviews and evaluate developed guidelines in expert focus groups.

• Phase 1a: a survey evaluating target group health access level, satisfaction with health services and experience of using digital health tools.
• Phase 1b: semi-structured interviews designed to create deeper insights about patient unmet needs and pains when accessing primary care and using digital health tools.
• Phase 2: designing guidelines for development of a conversational agent helping patients improve access to primary care.
• Phase 3: evaluation of created guidelines in a serie of expert focus groups