Now that “chatbot” has become a common word in the delivery of genetic counseling, the profession is faced with a barrage of questions. One important question is ‘how do patients perceive chatbots in clinical care?’ Tara Schmidlen, MS, CGC and her colleagues at Geisinger have positioned themselves at the vanguard of assessing how genetics patients perceive these nebulous wizards. She stated, “It doesn’t matter how cool we think chatbots are if our patients don’t find them useful or don’t feel comfortable with this approach.”
Given that one of NSGC’s strategic initiatives is to improve access to genetic counselor services, Schmidlen stated, “We saw the potential for chatbots to improve genetic counselor efficiency and access to genetic counselor services. We wanted to study it — put chatbots in front of real patients in a rural healthcare system and see what they had to say. Did they like them? Would they use them? Do they think this is a good idea?”
Schmidlen and her colleagues have conducted studies exploring these questions. Results from the featured qualitative research study indicated “participants supported using chatbots to consent for genomics research and to interact with healthcare providers for care coordination following receipt of genomic results. Most [participants] expressed willingness to use a chatbot to share genetic information with relatives.” That is not all, though. Schmidlen and her colleagues have more data to publish about chatbot implementation and their experiences.
Schmidlen arrived in research through a natural progression of job changes, making use of the experiences she gained in complex disease genetics and pharmacogenomics to land her first research position working on the Coriell Personalized Medicine Collaborative study. She now devotes 80% of her time to research and 20% to clinical cancer genetics as a clinical investigator/genetic counselor at Geisinger, where she has worked for the past three years.
It doesn’t matter how cool we think chatbots are if our patients don’t find them useful...
Schmidlen didn’t always enjoy research. In fact, she despised her graduate school thesis so much that by graduation, she stated, “I wanted to burn it and never do research again.” If anyone would have predicted that she would spend the bulk of her career as a research genetic counselor, she added, “I would have laughed.” Turns out, research had the last laugh because it is now a part of her life and she has grown to love it!
Schmidlen has some advice for genetic counselors interested in contributing to research in our field: “Find a research topic that you are passionate about because it won’t always be easy, but if it is a topic that you care deeply about you will be more motivated to push through the hard parts.” She also recommends getting experience as a research assistant and finding a good mentor through NSGC’s mentor program.
Sara Spencer, MS, CGC graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 2006 and was certified by the ABGC in 2007. She is currently a genetic counselor and an assistant professor in the Division of Clinical Genetics at Northwestern Medicine/University.