School nurse's assistant expert screening system.

The School Nurse's Assistant is designed to aid the School Nurse by providing a diagnostic discovery tool that also educates the student through the use of multimedia. Response initiated questions focus on the most pertinent student risk factors: lifestyle choices such as alcohol, drugs, and sexual activity. Because the questions are patient driven, the student stays interested as only relevant questions are presented. The School Nurse's Assistant provides the school nurse with increased sociographic information, and delivers cost-effective information to high risk segments of the student population. The potential for successful intervention is dramatic.

Instant medical history.

We introduce a knowledge-based patient driven screening expert system used in an outpatient family practice for 10,000 consecutive visits. The nurse hands the patient a laptop computer. Using knowledge-based questioning, subjective complaints are collected directly from the patient. The questions are response driven. Simultaneous analysis of the pattern of answering also determines the direction of the questioning. If indicated by the patient's answers, standardized published self-rating and self-assessment scales from the medical literature are administered totally unseen by the patient. The patient's complaints are succinctly presented to the physician as he enters the exam room. The physician can usually glance at the positive answers and graphically depicted scales and arrive at a working clinical impression in a few seconds before he begins his interview. Both he and the patient are totally focused on the problem at hand. Limitless potential for enhancing physician productivity is evoked.