The development of a language for automating medical interviews

Abstract

This paper describes the development of an authoring language for the automation of psychiatric interviews. The language is called the Questionnaire Design Tool (QDT) and was based on the structure of a psychiatric interview (the Schedules for Clinical Assessment in Neuropsychiatry, Wing et al., 1990). QDT separates interview text and branching rules from the mechanism that reads replies and skips to subsequent questions. Unlike some other authoring software, however, QDT also allows the author to apply complex symptom rating statements, at any point in the interview, to large sets of patient responses.