Brief Intervention Training with Adaptive Expert Agents

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Brief interventions in primary care settings can reduce the high risks and costs of alcohol abuse. However, health care providers lack skills for effective intervention. Training these skills requires individual coaching and practice, but live workshops and standardized patients are expensive, un-scalable, and impractical. Therefore, the proposed project is intended to investigate an innovative online approach using Expert Agent technology. A Virtual Coach motivates learners and directs them to strategically selected learning objects (e.g., texts, graphics, videos) that describe, justify, and demonstrate target skills. Virtual Role Players give learners authentic practice with a representative sample of patients. The Coach provides personalized feedback on role-play practice, guiding each learner along an individually optimized path to mastery of intervention skills. If successful, the approach would deliver substantial return on investment on training, including improvements in learner satisfaction, learning efficacy, scalability and reach, and cost-effectiveness. It would reduce individual and social costs of alcohol abuse. It also could be applied to training intervention skills for other health care objectives. In Phase 1, the feasibility and efficacy of the proposed approach will be evaluated for selected patient and provider populations. In Phase 2, we will evaluate the approach for a broader spectrum of healthcare providers and patient populations.