Enrolling LEP arthroplasty patients in a multilingual chatbot reduces emergency department visits

Enrolling limited-English-proficiency arthroplasty patients in a multilingual perioperative chatbot reduces postoperative emergency department visits, relative to comparable LEP patients not enrolled.

Narrative synthesis #

The single study bearing on this claim (Rainey 2023) found a lower ED-visit rate in the chatbot arm (0.9% vs 8.0%) that did not reach statistical significance (P = .085). Per the corpus convention, this non-significant result is wired as contradicting rather than supporting, though the point estimate directionally favors the chatbot. Treat as underpowered/hypothesis-generating pending a properly powered comparison.