Can AI Enhance Medical Student Goal Setting and Success?
Article Summary
- Two Miller School researchers are using an innovation grant to study how artificial intelligence can help medical students.
- The study will use an AI chatbot to assist medical students with goal setting, academic achievement and personal well-being.
- The researchers hope the chatbot will serve as an effective complement to the students’ human coaches.
A new research project funded by a ChangeMedEd innovation grant from the American Medical Association aims to determine if artificial intelligence (AI) coaching can enhance goal setting for medical students, help them optimize their academic achievement and promote their personal well-being.
Mairead Moloney, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Informatics and Health Data Science, is working with Adrian Reynolds, Ph.D., assistant professor of professional practice and founding director of the Office of Academic Enrichment at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, on this project. Together, they will study if an AI chatbot called “Coach Vici” affects medical student success rates in certain arenas.
The researchers hope to enroll about 200 medical students at different stages of their educational careers. Interested in enrolling? Email Dr. Mairead Moloney or Dr. Adrian Reynolds for information.
“In the short term, I hope that this grant directly helps the current medical student cohort here at the Miller School of Medicine achieve goal setting,” said Dr. Moloney, who leads the education vertical in her department and holds a joint appointment with the Frost Institute for Data Science and Computing.
If successful at the Miller School, the study could serve as a national model.
“This grant represents a significant opportunity to integrate cutting-edge technology, such as an AI chatbot, into what I consider to be a key facet of medical student learning – setting goals,” Dr. Reynolds said.
The students are expected to create goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound.
AI as Complement to Human Mentors
The investigators chose to explore AI technology to provide additional support for the more than 800 medical students at the Miller School of Medicine.
“It’s just not feasible to meet in-person with every student,” Dr. Reynolds said. “Therefore, it makes perfect sense to bring in an AI chatbot to explore how we can scale up what we do as human coaches.”
Today’s medical students need to be able to work with technology in a responsible way that best supports them in their medical education and in their future as health care providers, Dr. Maloney said.
“The hope is that AI will help make education more sustainable and cost-effective,” she said. “What we are really excited about is the potential to modify this AI chatbot in ways that support medical students even better than it might currently.”
A Forward-thinking Project
During the nine-month study, investigators will collect data to determine usage patterns, such as certain times of day or prior to exams, to tailor the chatbot notifications moving forward.
Dr. Moloney credits the Miller School leadership as “really forward thinking.” Through dual degrees and scholarly concentration options, the school is educating students to not only be health care providers, but also to think about the business and the technology aspects of medicine.
“They really are geared up to produce incredibly prepared and well-rounded medical students,” said Dr. Moloney.
Drs. Moloney and Reynolds will work in close collaboration with:
• Latha Chandran, M.D., M.P.H., M.B.A, executive dean for education and policy, founding chair of the Department of Medical Education and Bernard J. Fogel Chair in Medical Education at the Miller School
• Azizi Seixas, Ph.D., director of The Media and Innovation Lab, interim chair of the Department of Informatics and Health Data Science and lead of the grant’s advisory committee
“The integration of AI into academic coaching is a game changer,” Dr. Reynolds said. “This is the next frontier of academic coaching in medical education. I’m excited to see where the technology will take us in the future.”
Tags: AI, artificial intelligence, Department of Informatics and Health Data Science, Dr. Adrian Reynolds, Dr. Azizi Seixas, Dr. Latha Chandran, Dr. Mairead Moloney, medical students, technology