A Usability Evaluation of YouDiagnose: Artificial Intelligence Powered Physician Consultation

The COVID-19 Pandemic has resulted in a forced transition to tele-medicine, where history-taking and clinical assessments are performed remotely during video or telephonic consultations. While telemedicine has added to safety and social distancing during the pandemic, the manual and resource-intense process of telephonic and video consultations has not helped to ease the patient backlog, rather has added to this snowballing issue. This paper describes about YouDiagnose pre-consultation exercise that automates patient triage and clinical assessment using artificial intelligence technologies delivered through either a Smart Questionnaire or Chatbot. A usability evaluation was conducted with participants from the Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement Senate (PIES) of the Innovation Agency (an Academic Health Science Network) Qualitative feedback was obtained from the participants on both modalities and quantitative feedback in the form of the System Usability Scale (SUS), comparing the usability of both interaction modalities. The SUS scores were analysed using the Adjective Rating Scale that revealed the Smart Questionnaire had ‘Good Usability’ compared to ‘OK Usability’ of the Chatbot. The results shows the user experience and untapped potential of process automation and artificial intelligence in clinical services.