Illustration of a woman looking at her phone while waiting in a clinic room. (Midjourney)
The evolution of AI technology offers opportunities for many fields that could use the kind of efficiency and clarity that chatbots provide. In the world of health, a new tool co-developed by USC Viterbi School of Engineering and USC Keck School of Medicine researchers delivers on that promise.
“Chat-HPV: A Conversational Health AI Tool for HPV” is a new tool focusing on battling misconceptions of the HPV vaccines while promoting their benefits, all the while reducing the time needed for physicians to counsel with their patients. The study is led by Dr. Xiayoue Mona Guo, a gynecologic oncologist at Keck and Los Angeles General Medical Center.
“Healthcare providers’ recommendation is the strongest predictor of HPV vaccination, but time constraints remain a sizable barrier,” Dr. Guo said. “An AI-driven chatbot represents a potential solution to this problem by providing a setting for patients to receive accurate information and ask questions about the HPV vaccine without requiring additional provider time.”
The tool is co-developed by a USC Viterbi team led by Souti “Rini” Chattopadhyay, a WiSE Gabilan assistant professor of computer science at the Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science, as well as Jonathan May, a research associate professor of computer science at the Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science.
The Viterbi team has been working closely with Keck and Los Angeles General Medical Center residents and researchers, led by Dr. Guo. Guo’s team leads the clinical effort, with an eye towards educating disadvantaged groups who remain unvaccinated.
“The HPV vaccine can lower the risk of invasive cervical cancer by almost 90% — but vaccination rates remain below target, with significant disparities based on socioeconomic and racial or ethnic differences,” Guo said.
Meanwhile, the Viterbi team handles the technical side of the study. The two teams work closely to ensure the tool itself is aligned with what patients and physicians need.
“We have bi-weekly meetings with Dr. Guo, where we share our progress and discuss how patients or physicians can receive what we are building, because it’s a different domain and they know the people over there better than us,” Chattopadhyay said. “They’re also helping us run the studies. A lot of the residents are involved in talking to the patients, giving them this chatbot, and sitting with them to ask them how they feel.”
Guo, Chattopadhyay and May began work on the project in May 2025 with the help of a grant from the Physicians’ Foundation, an organization who aims to “take an active leadership role in shaping the future of health care.” The “Chat-HPV” tool has been built with both patients and physicians in mind, encouraging wider adoption of these vaccines while also saving much-needed time for hardworking doctors.
“The tool tries to handle both sides of the problem, by reducing physician burden and lowering the time that takes to counsel the patients — and by proactively and intelligently trying to infer what might be some of the misconceptions the patient comes in with that are barriers,” Chattopadhyay said.
“Chat-HPV” is also designed to educate patients, overcoming language and literacy barriers and eroding some of the stigma that comes with suggesting an HPV vaccine.
“HPV is one of the vaccines that has lower uptake for social reasons. There’s still a big stigma about it,” May said. So, the goal was to try to begin the education in the clinic room [while patients wait for the doctor] and engage with patients about the vaccine, answering basic questions.”
Guo, Chattopadhyay and May are still developing the tool, but the plan is to publish it as an “open-source” model, free and available to use by any medical facility that wishes to use it. While their current chatbot is based around the HPV vaccine specifically, the team sees it as a transferable tool towards many types of health decisions.
“The goal is first to publish the findings and then make the conversational agent a pluggable piece of technology that is not just going to help HPV, but other kinds of vaccines or counseling for specific treatments or certain types of issues that patients may have,” Chattopadhyay said. “The core technology would depend on being able to extract patients’ misconceptions and create a motivational interviewing technique around that.”
Published on April 1st, 2026
Last updated on April 6th, 2026