The capture and use of detailed process information in the Dialogix system for structured web-based interactions

Information gathering tools, such as questionnaires, surveys, and structured interviews, are ubiquitously used in evaluating patients and systems. Despite their common use, there is a desperate need for better questionnaires in medical research and epidemiology, and an infrastructure that lets them be publicly scrutinized. Unfortunately, there has been no common platform that supports the deployment of arbitrary information gathering tools. Some psychiatric diagnostic interviews and epidemiological trials require sophisticated structured interviews containing complex branching logic, dynamic phrase composition, and multiple languages. The Dialogix system was developed to meet this need and facilitate the rapid definition and web-based deployment of structured human-computer interactions. This paper describes the content and process-related information captured by Dialogix, and how that information has been used in the development and deployment of two large epidemiological studies.