Ask Patients with Patience: Enabling LLMs for Human-Centric Medical Dialogue with Grounded Reasoning

Accurate and efficient diagnosis in online medical consultations remains a challenge for current large language models. These models often rely on single-turn interactions and lack the ability to refine their predictions through follow-up questions. Additionally, their responses frequently contain complex medical terminology, making them less accessible to non-medical users and creating barriers to effective communication. In this paper, we introduce Ask Patients with Patience (APP), the first multi-turn dialogue that enables LLMs to iteratively refine diagnoses based on grounded reasoning. By integrating medical guidelines and entropy minimization, APP improves both diagnostic accuracy and efficiency. Furthermore, it features human-centric communication that bridges the gap between user comprehension and medical terminology, significantly enhancing user accessibility and engagement. We evaluated APP using a subset of the ReMeDi dataset, comparing it with single-turn and traditional multi-turn LLM baselines. APP achieved higher similarity scores in diagnosis predictions, demonstrating better alignment with ground truth diagnoses. Entropy analysis showed that APP reduces diagnostic uncertainty more rapidly across iterations, increasing confidence in its predictions. APP also excels in user accessibility and empathy, further bridging the gap between complex medical language and user understanding. Code will be released at: https://github.com/SuperMedIntel/AskPatients.