Medical audio response telecommunication information network

Abstract

Continuing research in computerised voice response at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA, has led to the design and implementation of a computer system which provides convenient, economical, and fast access to medical information through the use of the standard Touch Tone † † ‘Touch Tone’ is a registered trade mark of Bell Telephone Co. telephone. Requests are entered by the tone-generating push buttons and information is returned to the user by computer-generated voice through the telephone hand set. The design uses a small real-time computer as the communication link between users and several large time-sharing computers where the medical application programs are available. The system allows the user to obtain medical information easily since the communication computer performs all of the command functions necessary to activate the required programs. This Medical Audio Response Telecommunications Information Network has a vocabulary of approximately one thousand words and serves four users simultaneously. This paper describes the system and the medical application programs implemented.