Decoupling Patient Personas and Clinical Workflows: A Dual-Agent Approach to Realistic Medical Dialogue Generation

Summary

Pre-consultation medical dialogues are essential for collecting comprehensive patient information, but are costly to obtain at scale due to privacy and ethical constraints. Existing LLM-based synthesis methods often rely on prompt engineering or rigid rules, limiting their ability to balance clinical relevance with realistic patient diversity. We propose CoRPS-Dial, a controllable dual-agent framework for pre-consultation medical dialogue synthesis that integrates patient personas with guideline-aligned clinical workflow rules. CoRPS-Dial generates dialogues through interactions between a persona-driven patient agent and a process-guided doctor agent, followed by post-hoc quality control for role consistency, workflow completeness, and textual consistency. Experiments on coronary heart disease demonstrate that CoRPS-Dial improves alignment between synthetic and real dialogues in information coverage, clinical compliance, and dialogue naturalness. Downstream fine-tuning experiments further confirm the utility of the generated synthetic data for medical dialogue tasks. These results highlight the effectiveness of CoRPS-Dial for clinically grounded and controllable medical dialogue synthesis.