Unlikely Storyteller: Leveraging Narrative-Based Communication in LLM-Generated Medical Advice

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES: Time-constrained consultations in high-volume settings can crowd out patient-centered communication, while AI-generated advice may face algorithm aversion when it lacks a humanistic dimension. This study examined whether a brief narrative-based prompt could improve coded patient-facing communication features in an LLM relative to both clinicians and an unprompted model on authentic patient queries. METHODS: We conducted a three-condition comparative evaluation using a stratified sample of 1000 de-identified MedDialog-CN consultations (2016-2020). For each consultation, the same patient query was used to generate (i) a zero-shot GPT-o3-mini response and (ii) a narrative-prompted GPT-o3-mini response; the original physician reply served as the human baseline. Responses were annotated with a pre-specified schema operationalizing four communication dimensions-Storytelling, Empathy, Personalization, and Clarity-with expert adjudication. Frequency-based indicators were summarized as mean events per consultation, and binary indicators as proportions; secondary checks captured unwarranted certainty and risk-relevant language. RESULTS: Narrative prompting shifted coded patient-facing communication from sparse and selectively deployed (clinicians and zero-shot AI) to more routine and standardized. Across the reported communication measures, the prompted model showed the most favorable overall pattern, with higher narrative-device use, empathic support, contextual tailoring, and terminology explanation, alongside more frequent consideration of patient preferences and markedly higher rates of emotion-symptom linkage and the presence of a patient-centered narrative framework. CONCLUSIONS: Narrative prompting may offer a lightweight and potentially scalable strategy for improving patient-facing communication in Chinese asynchronous, text-based online consultations. An important next step is calibration: humanistic cues should be delivered selectively and safely so that responses remain credible, locally feasible, and cognitively manageable.