Scaffolded Turns and Logical Conversations: Designing Humanized LLM-Powered Conversational Agents for Hospital Admission Interviews

Hospital admission interviews are critical for patient care but strain nurses' capacity due to time constraints and staffing shortages. While LLM-powered conversational agents (CAs) offer automation potential, their rigid sequencing and lack of humanized communication skills risk misunderstandings and incomplete data capture. Through participatory design with clinicians and volunteers, we identified essential communication strategies and developed a novel CA that implements these strategies through: (1) dynamic topic management using graph-based conversation flows, and (2) context-aware scaffolding with few-shot prompt tuning. Technical evaluation on an admission interview dataset showed our system achieving performance comparable to or surpassing human-written ground truth, while outperforming prompt-engineered baselines. A between-subject study (N=44) demonstrated significantly improved user experience and data collection accuracy compared to existing solutions. We contribute a framework for humanizing medical CAs by translating clinician expertise into algorithmic strategies, alongside empirical insights for balancing efficiency and empathy in healthcare interactions, and considerations for generalizability.