Teaching Personalized Doctor-Patient Communication with AI: PerTRAIN – A Prototype for Interpersonally Responsive Virtual Patients in Medical Education

Abstract

Personalized medicine requires physicians to adapt clinical communication and decision-making to patients’ individual motives, emotions, and interpersonal behaviors. However, training these skills remains challenging, as established simulation-based formats—particularly actor-based simulations—are resource-intensive and difficult to scale. Consequently, there is a need for scalable and flexible training approaches that allow repeated practice across diverse patient personalities and clinical contexts.The PerTRAIN (Personalization Training in Medicine) project addresses this need by leveraging large language models (LLMs) to simulate virtual patients with dynamically adapting personality expression at scale. Grounded in Contemporary Integrative Interpersonal Theory (CIIT), patient behavior is modelled along the dimensions of agency and communion and updated in response to the medical trainee’s behavior, enabling systematic variation and dynamic adaptation of interpersonal behavior within medical scenarios. This allows trainees to learn how patient personality shapes communication, and to practice adaptive, patient-centered communication strategies and appropriate clinical decision-making.For the personalization trainings, we developed clinical cases in which personality expression substantially influences behavior in doctor–patient interactions, that represent common encounters in primary care, and that align with national guidelines for patient-centered care. An initial chat-based implementation enables structured interactions, dynamic personality adaptation, and iterative refinement. The system is designed as a complementary tool to existing simulation formats, offering a scalable, low-threshold environment for repeated practice and reflection. A first application in curricular teaching is scheduled for 2026. Future extensions of the framework are discussed, such as large-scale empirical validation, modelling long-term interpersonal trajectories, and the extension of interactions to multimodal formats.

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