Artificial Intelligence to support the dissemination of clinical practice guidelines to patients

Clinical practice guidelines provide evidence-based recommendations to inform healthcare decision making and optimise patient care. The primary audience for guidelines is clinicians, however some patients also want to access and use these guidelines to inform their healthcare decisions. Recognising this, guideline developers will sometimes create patient-friendly versions of their guidelines or other supporting material. However, such materials are time and resource intensive to develop, and beyond the scope of most funded guideline development projects. Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), including Large Language Models such as ChatGPT, offer exciting possibilities for improving the dissemination of guidelines to patients. For example, AI could be used to develop easy-read versions of the guidelines in multiple languages, or as an interface for patients to ask questions which could be answered based on the guideline content. In this project, we would like to test the potential uses of AI in the dissemination of guidelines to patients, using current Australian guidelines developed by the Australian Living Evidence Collaboration (ALEC). The project will have real-world application, with the results directly informing dissemination strategies for the ALEC’s current and future guidelines. The Australian Living Evidence Collaboration, within Cochrane Australia, School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, is a world-first initiative that brings together leading experts in evidence synthesis, guideline development and digital technologies to build a next generation system for delivering reliable, accessible, up-to-date evidence in health. You will be supervised by highly experienced researchers from ALEC, and welcomed into the ALEC team.