Currently submitted to: JMIR Medical Education
Date Submitted: Jul 2, 2026
Open Peer Review Period: Jul 6, 2026 - Aug 31, 2026
(currently open for review)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
The Microaffirmation Approach: A Tutorial to Improve Communication in Medical Education and Clinical Practice with Generative AI
ABSTRACT
Medical education and healthcare systems are inherently people-centered, yet high-stress clinical environments can foster implicit biases and microaggressions that disproportionally affect underrepresented minorities. Microaffirmations are small, intentional acts of expanding opportunities, gestures of inclusion, and graceful acts of listening, that may help to reduce these behaviors and improve psychological safety. This tutorial introduces an approach grounded in Universal Design Learning (UDL) theory to provide tailored, contextualized-driven resources, and human-centered training to integrate microaffirmations into undergraduate and graduate medical education and the clinical setting using generative artificial intelligence (AI) as a time-saving and efficient method of delivery. These AI methods, using effective prompt writing, generate visual aids that can be leveraged by clinicians to improve patient communication. The approach’s efficacy can be measured through future patient and family surveys, participation rates, and the potential reduction of workplace violence. While AI offers innovative solutions for improving peer and clinician patient experiences in medicine, this approach acknowledges essential limitations.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.