Patient Computer Dialog in Primary Care

Study Summary

With this clinical study, we hoped to find out if interactive, computer-based medical interviews, when carefully tested and honed and made available to patients in their homes on the Internet, will improve both the efficiency and quality of medical care and be well received and found helpful by patients and their physicians. We developed the computer-based medical interview consisting of over 6000 questions and a corresponding program that provides a concisely written, summary of the patient's responses to the questions in the interview. We then conducted read aloud and test/retest reliability evaluations of the interview and summary programs and determined the programs to be reliable. Results were published in the November 27, 2010 issue of the Journal of the American medical Informatics Association. We also developed, edited, and revised a program that provides a concisely written, summary of the patient's responses to the questions in the interview. We obtained a grant from the Rx Foundation to conduct clinical trial of our medical history. At the time of the office visit, the summary of the computer-based history of those patients who had completed the interview was available on the doctor's computer screen for the doctor and patient to use together on a voluntary basis. The results of this trial were published in the January 2012 issue of the Journal of the American Informatics Association.

Primary Outcome

The questionnaire consisted of 10 Likert scales questions assessing the computer-based history. The Likert scale ranged from 1 for 'Not at all' to 10 for 'Very'. We computed the mean of the responses to the question "How helpful were the questions when thinking about your health?" We also calculated a total score by averaging the mean scores of the 10 questions.

Interventions

• OTHER Computer-based medical history