UB professor uses AI to help bridge health care gaps in local Latinx communities

The use of artificial intelligence in education is rapidly growing. While some educators struggle to combat AI-generated essays and assignments, others are finding innovative ways to embrace its potential.

Melissa McCarron, a clinical assistant professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, College of Arts and Sciences, has discovered how to leverage AI to help health care professionals better serve Spanish-speaking patients with limited English proficiency.

McCarron works at the intersections of health care systems, language access and applied humanities. In her research and teaching, she focuses on interprofessional community-engaged research and the role of cultural competence in improving outcomes among communities most affected by health inequities. Her primary courses cater to students of the health professions.

As an instructor of medical Spanish, McCarron aims to increase the quality of care for non-English speaking residents in Buffalo. According to an Erie County survey, 7% of Buffalo residents do not speak English, and 6% of the total population of the city identify as Latinx.

“I was initially motivated to harness AI upon conversing with local health care providers about the communication challenges they face in clinical settings and how our students might assist in building resources for them,” McCarron says.

In considering some of the health care and professional domains — like hospice, palliative care and pharmacy — it occurred to McCarron that there are some recurring and predictable communication patterns for which AI could be leveraged to enable providers and students to more effectively communicate with their patients in languages other than English. 

In addition to advancing overall communications, McCarron’s courses prepare future health care providers for the nuances of navigating social and structural determinants of health for speakers of Spanish with limited English proficiency. She accomplishes this by engaging students with community-based experiential learning.

“My current community-engaged pedagogical initiatives focus on culturally informed outreach strategies targeting issues such as vaccine hesitancy, reluctance to use emergency medical services, and the deployment of traditional healing knowledge and folkloric illnesses in describing and treating mental health and other conditions,” McCarron explains.

“Such opportunities enable our language students to observe the role of cultural concepts of health and traditional healing practices — ultimately improving outcomes.”

McCarron says that empowering language students to interact with providers, scholars, clinicians and institutions engaged in the professions they are seeking out facilitates crucial conversations.

McCarron’s students frequently work with the Erie County Department of Senior Services. Through an internship opportunity with the organization, students use their language skills to support outreach efforts aimed at improving access to government services for local communities facing linguistic and cultural barriers.

McCarron hopes the internship “will provide a space for students to gain real-world insights into community service and government relations, while deepening their understanding of the role that language proficiency and cultural awareness play in building trust and enhancing service delivery among diverse populations.”

The internship is part of a larger project funded by a grant from UB’s Civic Engagement Research Fund.

The ultimate goal of this initiative is to facilitate active involvement by marginalized and underrepresented communities in the decision-making processes related to services that most affect them. McCarron hopes the findings will also be pertinent to other agencies on aging that may be experiencing the same or similar problems in other counties across New York State.

A number of recent grants and fellowship opportunities have provided exciting opportunities for McCarron to explore new resources and interdisciplinary approaches to using AI for teaching and learning.

With support from the SUNY Innovative Instruction and Technology Grant, McCarron is developing an AI-driven pedagogical application to facilitate “culturally competent health care communication in Spanish, which we plan to include in our medical Spanish curricula,” she explains.

She is currently working toward establishing an interdisciplinary community of practice involving graduate, undergraduate and professional students from across UB. McCarron is also using AI in the classroom with her students to develop culturally competent patient profiles and clinical simulations in Spanish.

“I focus on modeling ethical AI use, enhancing general AI literacy, and training our students to critically engage with prompt engineering and AI output as we focus on populations most affected by health inequities,” she says.

“We are able to mitigate cultural stereotypes and also analyze the linguistic characteristics of the generative AI output and advance language proficiency through focusing on register [the specific way language is used in a particular situation] and the language varieties most commonly spoken by patient populations in Western New York, which are not conventionally centered in Spanish language textbooks and teaching resources.”

McCarron says she is committed to helping students develop the AI literacy necessary to leverage its potential for positive and ethical purposes.

“It is essential that we guide our students in becoming responsible and ethical users of AI,” she says. “I have found that by centering thoughtful, culturally aware prompt engineering and framing generative AI outputs as texts to be analyzed critically and humanistically, our students are transforming their initial apprehensions into a sense of agency and empowerment.”