Towards conversational assistants for health applications: using ChatGPT to generate conversations about heart failure

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Anuja Tayal, Devika Salunke, Barbara Di Eugenio, Paula G. Allen-Meares, Eulàlia P. Abril, Olga Garcia-Bedoya, Carolyn Dickens, Andrew D. Boyd

Published: 2025, Last Modified: 19 Mar 2026CoRR 2025EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: We explore the potential of ChatGPT (3.5-turbo and 4) to generate conversations focused on self-care strategies for African-American heart failure patients -- a domain with limited specialized datasets. To simulate patient-health educator dialogues, we employed four prompting strategies: domain, African American Vernacular English (AAVE), Social Determinants of Health (SDOH), and SDOH-informed reasoning. Conversations were generated across key self-care domains of food, exercise, and fluid intake, with varying turn lengths (5, 10, 15) and incorporated patient-specific SDOH attributes such as age, gender, neighborhood, and socioeconomic status. Our findings show that effective prompt design is essential. While incorporating SDOH and reasoning improves dialogue quality, ChatGPT still lacks the empathy and engagement needed for meaningful healthcare communication.