FW-HTF-P: Augmenting Healthcare Professionals’ Training, Expertise Development, and Diagnostic Reasoning with AI-based Immersive Technologies in Telehealth

The University Of Central Florida Board Of Trustees, Orlando FL

Investigators

Abstract

Telehealth is greatly affecting our nation’s healthcare system, economy, and workforce, including the training of healthcare professionals (i.e., physicians, residents). This project advances health, psychological, educational, medical, engineering, and computing sciences related to human-machine AI collaboration in delivering high-quality patient care and augmenting medical training and expertise development in telehealth. An interdisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Central Florida (UCF), along with hospital and educational partners from UCF’s College of Medicine, Orlando VA Medical Center, Nemours Children’s Hospital, and AdventHealth University, will augment healthcare-professional training, expertise development, and diagnostic reasoning using AI-based immersive technologies in telehealth. Given the transformative and disruptive impact of telehealth across all societal facets (e.g., racial disparities, economic burden on patients, organizational disruptions, lack of medical training in telehealth), this project assembles, connects, engages, and addresses current local, state, and national disparities by involving academics across disciplines and leveraging evidence-based research with a variety of stakeholders, including government officials, hospital administrators, healthcare professionals and patients, employers, and industry partners. The interdisciplinary research team and collaborating stakeholders work together in the design of a paper-based prototype intelligent collaborative immersive telehealth system for training healthcare professionals and interacting with real human patients, transforming current medical training, fostering expertise development, and significantly enhancing patient outcomes. This planning grant has three goals. (1) To secure, engage, collaborate, and develop a network with stakeholders, academics, and industry partners across multiple sectors to advance understanding of workforce, health, economic, organizational, AI, technological, and social issues related to telehealth. (2) To test the effectiveness of existing telehealth technologies used by healthcare professionals to understand their impact on diagnostic reasoning by collecting multiple sources of data from healthcare professionals and patients to examine physiological-cognitive-affective-metacognitive-social processes during telehealth interactions. And (3) to design an intelligent collaborative virtual telehealth system prototype that supports healthcare professionals’ diagnostic reasoning, expertise development, and training that can be used in various healthcare scenarios. Intelligent collaborative immersive telehealth systems will augment and transform healthcare professionals’ education, training, and delivery of high-quality medical care. Such systems are key to addressing major societal, health, educational, technological, economic, organizational, and human challenges (e.g., quality of medical care, lack of quality telehealth education and training). The project’s immediate impact will be broadening participation across local, state, and national stakeholders in addressing major issues related to telehealth and how it will transform and disrupt society. Various data types collected from this project will provide evidence of the issues related to medical expertise, diagnostic reasoning, medical errors, and organizational disruptions, and new metrics for measuring the impacts of telehealth. Additionally, hundreds of community members from all sectors will participate in workshops, data collection, and design sessions where they explore current telehealth environments and design a paper-based prototype intelligent collaborative telehealth system to enhance medical education and training to accelerate expertise development, minimize medical errors, and deliver high-quality medical care while fostering the workforce pipeline in healthcare professions and AI in medicine. Additionally, these findings will be broadly applicable to training middle-schoolers and high-schoolers interested in STEM and healthcare professions. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.