The medical appointment scheduler.
In order to enhance our understanding of how to best improve patient care, it was necessary to initially identify key questions that patients ask most frequently by recording actual calls made by home hemodialysis patients to a dialysis clinic over a three-month period. From an initial analysis of the recorded conversations, one of the most frequent reasons for patient calls was for scheduling concerns. Since the use of automated systems often enable a quicker response to patients' needs and alleviate time demands on the personnel that have to answer these calls, an automated scheduling system was designed and implemented to address this concern. The SCHEDULER is a mixed-initiative spoken dialogue system that allows a patient to schedule an appointment with a provider over the telephone. The system was implemented using SPEECHBUILDER, a utility developed by the Spoken Language System group at M.I.T. that helps automatically configure human language technology servers to create a new conversational system. We describe the system architecture, general considerations in the design, and a preliminary evaluation of the system.