FW-HTF-P: Augmenting Healthcare Professionals’ Training, Expertise Development, and Diagnostic Reasoning with AI-based Immersive Technologies in Telehealth

远程医疗正在极大地影响我们国家的医疗保健系统、经济和劳动力，包括医疗保健专业人员（即医生、住院医生）的培训。该项目推进与人机人工智能协作相关的健康、心理、教育、医学、工程和计算科学，以提供高质量的患者护理，并加强远程医疗的医疗培训和专业知识发展。来自中佛罗里达大学（UCF）的跨学科研究团队，以及来自UCF医学院、奥兰多VA医学中心、Nemours儿童医院和AdventHealth大学的医院和教育合作伙伴，将在远程医疗中使用基于人工智能的沉浸式技术来增强医疗保健专业培训、专业知识开发和诊断推理。鉴于远程医疗在所有社会方面（例如，种族差异、患者经济负担、组织混乱、缺乏远程医疗培训）具有变革性和破坏性影响，本项目汇集、联系、参与并解决了当前地方、州和国家的差异，方法是让跨学科的学者参与进来，并利用循证研究与各种利益攸关方(包括政府官员、医院管理人员、医疗保健专业人员、患者、雇主和行业合作伙伴。跨学科研究团队和合作利益相关者共同设计了一个基于纸张的原型智能协作沉浸式远程医疗系统，用于培训医疗保健专业人员并与真实的人类患者互动，从而改变当前的医疗培训，促进专业知识的发展，并显著提高患者的治疗效果。这项计划拨款有三个目标。(1)与多个部门的利益相关者、学者和行业合作伙伴建立、参与、协作和发展网络，以促进对与远程医疗相关的劳动力、健康、经济、组织、人工智能、技术和社会问题的理解。(2)通过收集医疗专业人员和患者的多个数据来源，考察远程医疗互动过程中的生理-认知-情感-元认知-社会过程，检验医疗专业人员使用现有远程医疗技术的有效性，以了解其对诊断推理的影响。(3)设计一个支持医疗保健专业人员诊断推理、专业知识开发和培训的智能协作虚拟远程医疗系统原型，可用于各种医疗保健场景。智能协作式沉浸式远程医疗系统将增强和改变医疗保健专业人员的教育、培训和提供高质量的医疗服务。这些系统是解决重大社会、卫生、教育、技术、经济、组织和人类挑战（例如，医疗质量、缺乏高质量的远程保健教育和培训）的关键。该项目的直接影响将是扩大地方、州和国家利益攸关方在解决与远程医疗及其将如何改变和扰乱社会有关的重大问题方面的参与。从该项目收集的各种数据类型将提供与医疗专业知识、诊断推理、医疗错误和组织中断有关的问题的证据，以及衡量远程保健影响的新指标。此外，来自各行各业的数百名社区成员将参加研讨会、数据收集和设计会议，他们将探索当前的远程医疗环境，并设计一个基于纸张的智能协作远程医疗系统原型，以加强医学教育和培训，加速专业知识的发展，最大限度地减少医疗差错，并提供高质量的医疗服务，同时促进医疗保健专业的劳动力管道和医疗领域的人工智能。此外，这些研究结果将广泛适用于对STEM和医疗保健专业感兴趣的初高中学生的培训。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Telehealth is greatly affecting our nation’s healthcare system, economy, and workforce, including the training of healthcare professionals (i.e., physicians, residents). This project advances health, psychological, educational, medical, engineering, and computing sciences related to human-machine AI collaboration in delivering high-quality patient care and augmenting medical training and expertise development in telehealth. An interdisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Central Florida (UCF), along with hospital and educational partners from UCF’s College of Medicine, Orlando VA Medical Center, Nemours Children’s Hospital, and AdventHealth University, will augment healthcare-professional training, expertise development, and diagnostic reasoning using AI-based immersive technologies in telehealth. Given the transformative and disruptive impact of telehealth across all societal facets (e.g., racial disparities, economic burden on patients, organizational disruptions, lack of medical training in telehealth), this project assembles, connects, engages, and addresses current local, state, and national disparities by involving academics across disciplines and leveraging evidence-based research with a variety of stakeholders, including government officials, hospital administrators, healthcare professionals and patients, employers, and industry partners. The interdisciplinary research team and collaborating stakeholders work together in the design of a paper-based prototype intelligent collaborative immersive telehealth system for training healthcare professionals and interacting with real human patients, transforming current medical training, fostering expertise development, and significantly enhancing patient outcomes.This planning grant has three goals. (1) To secure, engage, collaborate, and develop a network with stakeholders, academics, and industry partners across multiple sectors to advance understanding of workforce, health, economic, organizational, AI, technological, and social issues related to telehealth. (2) To test the effectiveness of existing telehealth technologies used by healthcare professionals to understand their impact on diagnostic reasoning by collecting multiple sources of data from healthcare professionals and patients to examine physiological-cognitive-affective-metacognitive-social processes during telehealth interactions. And (3) to design an intelligent collaborative virtual telehealth system prototype that supports healthcare professionals’ diagnostic reasoning, expertise development, and training that can be used in various healthcare scenarios. Intelligent collaborative immersive telehealth systems will augment and transform healthcare professionals’ education, training, and delivery of high-quality medical care. Such systems are key to addressing major societal, health, educational, technological, economic, organizational, and human challenges (e.g., quality of medical care, lack of quality telehealth education and training). The project’s immediate impact will be broadening participation across local, state, and national stakeholders in addressing major issues related to telehealth and how it will transform and disrupt society. Various data types collected from this project will provide evidence of the issues related to medical expertise, diagnostic reasoning, medical errors, and organizational disruptions, and new metrics for measuring the impacts of telehealth. Additionally, hundreds of community members from all sectors will participate in workshops, data collection, and design sessions where they explore current telehealth environments and design a paper-based prototype intelligent collaborative telehealth system to enhance medical education and training to accelerate expertise development, minimize medical errors, and deliver high-quality medical care while fostering the workforce pipeline in healthcare professions and AI in medicine. Additionally, these findings will be broadly applicable to training middle-schoolers and high-schoolers interested in STEM and healthcare professions.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.