Artificial intelligence mediated communication in Polish primary healthcare

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are increasingly embedded in Polish primary healthcare (Podstawowa OpiekaZdrowotna, POZ), reshaping how clinical encounters are conducted and documented. Based on a narrativereview (2015–2026) of applied-linguistics and health-communication literature – spanning ConversationAnalysis, narrative medicine, genre theory, and plain-language standards – and illustrated with Polish-languageclinical examples, this article argues that AI systems act as algorithmic interactants that introduceevidential “turns” into consultations, shifting epistemic authority away from patients and clinicians; compressor flatten illness narratives by favouring categorical over experiential detail; and push clinical documentationtoward standardised, template-based genres at the expense of stance-marking and interpersonal nuance. Itfurther identifies Polish-specific linguistic features – free word order, rich inflexion, aspectual distinctions,dialectal variation, and dense medical lexicon – that create systematic risks of symptom misrecognitionand misclassification in NLP/ASR-based tools. Drawing these strands together, the article proposesan implementation framework combining plain-language documentation standards, CA-informed repairstrategies, genre-sensitive documentation models, and corpus-based sociolinguistic validation, with the aimof reducing communicative and equity risks as AI is adopted in Polish primary care.