AI in Strategic Health Communication: Opportunities, Risks, and Ethics of AI Applications in Healthcare

Dear Colleagues,

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming healthcare communication across disease prevention, health promotion, risk and crisis response, and clinical care delivery. Within healthcare systems, AI-powered tools, such as conversational health chatbots, generative content systems, predictive analytics, and automated misinformation detection and correction, are increasingly used to support patient–provider communication, health behavior adoption, clinical decision support, and public health outreach. Recent scholarship demonstrates that these technologies are reshaping how health information is produced, personalized, disseminated, and evaluated in healthcare contexts, with implications for patient understanding, trust, adherence, and engagement. Evidence further suggests that patients’ and publics’ responses to AI-mediated healthcare communication depend heavily on users’ beliefs, trust, ethical perceptions, and contextual expectations, particularly when AI systems are involved in sensitive or high-stakes health decisions.

At the same time, the integration of AI into healthcare communication introduces critical challenges related to transparency, algorithmic bias, privacy, accountability, and equity, especially in clinical, public health, and crisis settings where misinformation, uncertainty, and health disparities are prevalent. These concerns are particularly salient for underserved populations and in contexts involving vaccination, infectious disease outbreaks, chronic disease management, and emergency response. Building on advances in health communication, crisis communication, health misinformation research, and patient–provider relationship management, this Special Issue invites interdisciplinary scholarship that critically examines how AI can ethically and effectively support healthcare communication goals, including improving patient outcomes, supporting informed decision-making, and promoting equitable access to reliable health information.

This Special Issue welcomes submissions that address these questions across diverse healthcare contexts and populations. We anticipate contributions from multiple disciplines and methodological traditions, including quantitative (e.g., experiments and surveys), qualitative (e.g., interviews and focus groups), computational approaches (e.g., large language models and automated textual analysis), and mixed methods. By integrating theoretical, methodological, and applied perspectives, this Special Issue aims to clarify whether, when, how, and under what conditions AI enhances or undermines healthcare communication outcomes, with direct implications for patients, healthcare professionals, public health institutions, and policy makers.

Dr. Alice Cheng
Dr. Qinghua Yang
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Healthcare is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• artificial intelligence (AI)
• strategic health communication
• health misinformation
• AI-powered chatbots in health communication
• AI-mediated crisis and risk communication
• human–AI interaction
• algorithmic ethics
• trust and transparency of AI
• large language models