Quick ways to up your game in patient communication. I’ve done the prompt design work for you!
Have you been using chat GPT? Yeah, me too. So in today’s episode, I’m going to share six chat GPT prompts you can use to improve your patient communication.
Hi, everybody. This is 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication, ranked #20 in the top 100 podcasts in Social Sciences, giving you inspiration and strategies to improve engagement, experience, and satisfaction since 2017. I’m Dr. Anne Marie Liebel, a researcher, consultant, and educator with expertise in communication and education. I’m here to dig into some of what we might take for granted about communication in our professional lives. If you want to strengthen the work you can do in your professional sphere, this is a place for you because communication touches everything. We’re here to learn, get inspired, and most importantly, make the difference we got into our jobs to make. If you value this show, the stories and inspiration and research, I’ve got good news. I can help your organization. Visit healthcommunicationpartners .com and click on contact or connect with me on LinkedIn.
So these prompts are for when you want or need to change up your spiel, that thing that you explain many, many times a day. This isn’t talking about doing research here. This is for when you want a different way or an additional way to say what you’ve been saying. Because we all want to be as effective as possible, and having multiple ways to say something is a powerful tool to have as an educator and a communicator.
Having additional options for explaining something can help when there are cultural or linguistic differences. It’s going to help because people’s emotional states can also affect their understanding. Because we’ve got people dealing with fear or stress or pain or all of the above and they might not process information really well the first time they hear something. And giving them an additional option can give them more ways to understand, and more time to process. And having more than one way to explain something can also kind of open up the topic for discussion, for questions, for engagement. Because you’re presenting multiple options to people, they know there’s more than one way to think about this. You might even ask them which of these did they prefer or there were parts of one explanation that they liked more than another. And it gives them a chance to not just sit back and listen.
So of course I used chatGPT in this episode. I asked it about different ways a health professional could explain a common medical condition, if they wanted to do it in multiple ways. It came up with six examples and chose hypertension as the case. Those six examples were: use plain language, use a visual, metaphor or analogy, a written or digital summary, a video or app, and teach-back. Now that’s a pretty good list. I think those are all things that it’s good to be reminded of. But I’m also guessing you’re probably doing most of them already because you listen to the show and we’ve talked about all of those before.
So I wanted to dig a little bit deeper, right? You want to up your game. That’s why you’re listening to this. And this is a riff on one of our early episodes that I called 10 Ways to explain the same thing. Basically having more options being better for learning and communication. So I grabbed some of the items from that episode and put them through chatGPT.
What I’m going to do is tell you the prompt so that you can copy it and use it. And then I’ll give you like a little bit of a snippet of what the output was so you can get a sense of, okay, would that sort of an approach work for what it is that you have to explain.
#1. I wrote, “Please give me an example of a way to explain hypertension to an adult who may not have a medical background, using a story.”
Now, an adult who may not have a medical background, you might also want to put in there “an adult who may use a language other than English at home.” So, go ahead and throw that phrase in there too, to help with the plain language-ness of it, but I did not do that for these examples, but I want to at least throw that in there as an option for you to play with.
Okay, let me tell you what chat GPT said about the story: “Let me tell you a quick story that might help explain what high blood pressure is. Imagine a small town with a water system that delivers water to every house through a network of pipes. For years, the water flows just right. Not too fast, not too slow. The pipes stay strong and the houses all get what they need.” And then, you know, the conflict happens, the high blood pressure, and it goes on from there. I kind of like the goldilocks and the three bears kind of feel that that one has to it.
#2. Please give me an example of a way to explain hypertension to an adult who may not have a medical background using a parts -to- whole framing.
Here’s what it said. “Let’s break high blood pressure down into parts so it’s easier to understand. First, think about your heart. It’s a pump that pushes blood through your body. Next, think about your blood vessels, like flexible tubes that carry the blood to all of your organs and tissues. Then there’s the blood itself.” And the explanation continues on.
#3. Please give me an example of a way to explain hypertension to an adult who may not have a medical background using a chronological structure.
What I got: “Let’s walk through how high blood pressure can affect the body over time. In the beginning, your heart and blood vessels work together smoothly. Your heart pumps blood and your arteries carry it away to the rest of your body.” Goes on from there.
#4. Please give me an example of a way to explain hypertension to an adult who may not have a medical background using compare/contrast.
Well, chat did really well here: “Let’s think about how your blood flows through your arteries like water through a garden hose. When everything is working normally, like a hose with water flowing at the right speed, your blood pressure is in a healthy range. The heart pumps, the blood moves smoothly, and the hose or artery stays strong. But with high blood pressure, it’s like turning the water up too high. The pressure inside the hose increases. Over time, that high pressure can wear out the hose. Or, in your case, damage your arteries, your heart, even your kidneys or eyes.”
Now for the last two, I’m going to share the prompts, but not the output, and I’ll tell you why.
#5 is general to particular. I wrote,
#5. “Please give me an example of a way to explain hypertension to an adult who may not have a medical background using a general to particular structure.”
It did okay here, but I didn’t find it illuminated much, and it didn’t have kind of the punch and the flavor of some of the other examples for hypertension. So it might do well with the topic that you have to explain though, so you want to give general to particular a shot.
And finally,
#6. Please give me an example of a way to explain hypertension to an adult who may not have a medical background, using cause and effect.
Well, it did a really well here, maybe no surprise. I think GPTs are good for this kind of work, but I’m not sharing this with you, because you’re probably already doing cause and effect. But I do want to mention: a nice extra was that it offered to generate a visual for you with icons or turn it into a flyer. And now we’re getting into health literacy land. So, if you do go that way and ask for it to generate some text that you want to share, make sure before you send it out, you have a health literacy expert look it over.
Three thoughts
Okay, three thoughts I want to leave you with to end up this episode.
One, remember these programs get things wrong. You’re the expert here. Obviously, you want to check everything for factual correctness. And I apologize to any of the experts in hypertension out there who were cringing at things that the chat got wrong. Sorry about that.
Secondly, we know the gold standard is co-creating with your patient. So think about telling your patient that you’re trying a new explanation. What did they think of it? How could you improve your explanation? And maybe have they heard or seen an explanation that they liked? And you borrow that for next time.
And a gentle reminder, you already know, your patients are not empty vessels devoid of knowledge. So make sure before you get into your snazzy new spiel, that you ask them what they already know or think about the topic, and reinforce whatever they say that’s accurate.
The point of all of this is for you to have a few explanations in your pocket that you feel comfortable saying. So obviously you’re going to rework the wording so it feels natural to you. So you have options and so your patients have options. You’ve got to like it enough to say it, but ultimately success is determined by how much your patients like it and what they take away from it.
Now, if you like thinking about AI and health communication, you’ll want to tune into our next episode where I interview Dr. Ayo Ologoke and we talk about further ways that AI can help support you in your health communication work.
If your organization wants help with health communication, with or without chat GPT, give me a call, connect with me on LinkedIn, or visit healthcommunicationpartners .com and click on contact. This has been 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication from Health Communication Partners, Audio, Engineering, and Music from Joe Liebel, Additional Music, from Alexis Rounds.
Thanks for listening to 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication from HealthCommunication Partners, LLC. Find us at healthcommunicationpartners .com.