Designing for Negotiation in Collaborative Healthcare: The Role of AI Mediators

• doi:10.1145/3786579.3799789

Proceedings of the 2026 ACM Interactive Health Conference

Collaborative healthcare is shaped by complex negotiations among patients, caregivers, and clinicians, yet current technologies focus primarily on monitoring and adherence, offering limited support for shared decision-making. Differences in knowledge, power, and goals often generate tension around treatment, lifestyle, and data-sharing decisions. Recent advances in GenAI and LLMs open the possibility for AI to act as a mediator, translating clinical evidence into patient-relevant insights, visualizing trade-offs, and supporting negotiation without overriding human agency. This workshop aims to bring together an interdisciplinary mix of HCI researchers, AI practitioners, clinicians, and designers to explore AI-mediated collaboration. Through hands-on activities, participants will discuss design challenges and opportunities, identify ethical and socio-technical tensions, create speculative design stories, and future research avenues. The goal is to develop a shared research agenda for interactive health systems that foster equitable negotiation, respect stakeholder agency, and place human relationships at the center of collaborative care.