ConversHIVe: AI-Based Communication Training for HIV Prevention and Care

Overview

Every interaction between an HIV care team and a person with HIV can build trust or trigger disengagement. Communication quality is not peripheral in HIV care: it is a mechanism through which equity is enacted or undermined in real time. Implicit bias, often linked to factors like sexual orientation and race, can adversely affect access to care, especially for people who have already faced stigma and discrimination.

Addressing implicit bias requires self-awareness and practice in difficult communication situations. Those opportunities are scarce. HIV clinics and community-based organizations operate under limited time, staffing shortages, turnover, and restricted access to sustainable training infrastructure.

ConversHIVe is an AI-driven platform that makes that practice available on demand. It builds on our UnBIASED work, which established social behaviors such as dominance, interactivity, engagement, and warmth as measurable indicators of implicit bias. ConversHIVe uses Large Language Models to provide rapid simulation and feedback: care teams practice with simulated patients grounded in the lived experiences of people with HIV, and receive interpretable feedback derived from multimodal analysis of how the interaction actually went.

A design principle distinguishes these simulated patients from goal-directed conversational agents: they hold information back. Trust has to be earned over the course of the conversation before a patient’s underlying needs surface, which is what makes the rehearsal realistic.

ConversHIVe-Live, the project’s second phase, moves from validation to real-world implementation, embedding the training in routine HIV service delivery. It reframes communication not as a one-time competency but as a continuously improvable part of the care infrastructure.

Funding and External Collaborations

ConversHIVe is funded by the California HIV/AIDS Research Program (CHRP) under its Low Barrier Technology Interventions for HIV Prevention and Care program, with a second phase supporting real-world implementation.

The work is a collaboration between the HXI Lab and the Owen Clinic at UC San Diego, the AntiViral Research Center (AVRC) Community Advisory Board, and San Diego community-based organizations including Christie’s Place, San Ysidro Health Center, and Father Joe’s Villages.

Publications