MediBot is an online learning platform for medical students, developed in collaboration with Unisanté Lausanne. The aim of this work is to illustrate the impact of gender biases on health professionals during a medical examination of patients. With MediBot, medical students can learn more about gender biases through patient stories from emergency wards and practice their clinical reasoning skills through a chatbot as a patient.
Gender bias can manifest in various ways, such as differential treatment, stereotypes, and assumptions based on a person's gender. This bias can influence the questions asked during medical history taking, the interpretation of symptoms, and subsequent healthcare provision.
“ Even though we were made aware of gender bias early in our curriculum, they are still present in spite of me in certain aspects, but also in the medical practice of my superiors.” [ID_063, woman]
By addressing gender biases in the healthcare system, medical professionals can ensure that healthcare is delivered equitably and inclusively. This involves recognizing and actively combating biases, as well as promoting gender-sensitive approaches in patient care.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5IPshBl06Y
Unisanté, the University Hospital of Lausanne, has started offering a course on clinical reasoning with additional learning materials on gender biases. They recognized that the lack of resources for medical students was not efficient for learning and reflecting on their own gender biases. Therefore, they initiated an experiment to develop a chatbot that can be used in medical education when there is a shortage of personnel resources.
"We are developing and testing a chatbot prototype for Unisanté Lausanne that will be used in the classroom to raise awareness about gender bias in medical education.”
The relevance and timeliness of this approach are supported by several studies that have demonstrated the benefits and unique opportunities of using chatbots (Chiu et al., 2022; Huang et al., 2022; Wollny et al., 2021). However, there is still a lack of research examining the information needs related to chatbots or whether chatbots adequately fulfill these needs.
Article
Geiser_Reflexivity gender bias_PEC2022.pdf
The goal of this bachelor's thesis was to investigate how a chatbot game can contribute to reducing gender bias in medical education. In total, we conducted two usability testings with medical students and subject matter experts to evaluate the user-friendliness and effectiveness of the chatbot concept. The feedback received was thoroughly documented and presented in slide decks
Literature