Development and Validation of ChatVTE: Immersive Interactive Intelligent Patient Educational System for Venous...

Effective patient education is crucial in preventing venous thromboembolism (VTE), improving patient outcomes, and reducing healthcare costs. However, traditional educational methods often lack engagement and fail to address individual patient needs comprehensively.

This study aimed to develop and preliminarily validate an immersive, large language model (LLM)-based patient education system for VTE, designed to promote patient engagement and care adherence by delivering highly relevant, actionable, and patient-centered information.

We developed ChatVTE, an interactive intelligent patient education platform, by integrating a retrieval-augmented large language model (LLM; Qwen1.5-7B) with Text-to-Speech (TTS) and Lip-Synchronization (Lip-Sync) technologies. The system's performance was initially assessed through a comparative evaluation against ChatGPT. This involved utilizing a standardized set of VTE-related questions, administered from December 10 to 31, 2024, with responses rigorously evaluated by four VTE domain experts using a 5-point Likert scale for accuracy, completeness, consistency, and safety. Subsequently, we consecutively enrolled a prospective cohort of 25 adult inpatients with VTE from the Departments of Pulmonary Vascular and Thrombotic Diseases and General Surgery at the Sixth Medical Center of the Chinese People's Liberation Army General Hospital between March 1 and May 31, 2025. These participants engaged with the ChatVTE system throughout their inpatient stay and completed post-intervention assessments upon discharge.

Expert evaluation demonstrated that ChatVTE significantly outperformed ChatGPT in accuracy, completeness, consistency (all P<.001, r>0.5), and safety (P=.011, r=0.327). Among the 25 enrolled patients (mean age: 55.4±13.2 years), ChatVTE achieved high average scores (mean score >4.0/5.0) in 8 of the 9 experience dimensions evaluated, but received a notably lower score in the emotional support domain (1.92/5.0).

This study validates the feasibility of ChatVTE in the management of VTE patients, demonstrating its potential to enhance the quality of patient-provider interaction and the efficacy of knowledge dissemination. These preliminary findings suggest ChatVTE could be a valuable tool for improving patient education and facilitating shared clinical decision-making.