Dialog organization and functional communication in a medical assistance task by phone

This study is based on a corpus of 110 dialogs recorded in a medical assistance telephonist's workstation. Given the nature of the task, we have considered five main variables in dialog (topics) as well as their order of occurrence (sequences). These data were analyzed with a lexical analysis program. Results show a great difference between Operator/Specialist dialog and Operator/Nonspecialist dialog. Dialog "script" is very strong in the first case in which the operator merely plays a feedback role (routine procedures). If the caller is a private individual, the situation is often an indefinite problem, and the operator may have to adapt to the person (weak script) to obtain relevant information as quickly as possible (problem-solving procedures). This provides confirmation of the operator's twofold competence (efficient decision-making, dialog management).