Clinical Communication as a Core Clinical Skill

Clinical Communication as a Core Clinical Skill: Call to Revisit Medical Curricula and Practice

Clinical communication plays a central role in patient understanding, trust, adherence, satisfaction, and perceived safety. Yet, compared with diagnostics and therapeutics, it is often taught episodically and assessed without detailed feedback on the language used in real clinical interactions.

This advisory whitepaper brings together medical education literature, regulatory frameworks, empathy research, clinician perspectives, and an online survey to examine the persistent gaps in communication training and practice. It identifies three key challenges: fragmented training, limited objective feedback on actual language use, and the absence of workflow-compatible support for clinicians.

The paper presents ConversationAIly as a discourse-based feedback system designed to make communication patterns more observable and actionable. It outlines potential applications in undergraduate and postgraduate education, AETCOM-aligned training, reflective in-clinic review, and telemedicine.

The whitepaper also discusses the importance of transparent algorithms, patient consent, data protection, clinician control, and non-punitive governance. It positions technology as a support for reflection and learning—not a replacement for human mentorship, faculty feedback, or bedside teaching.

Document type: Advisory whitepaper Publication: DAGS 2025 Advisory Whitepaper