Automated report writing

ABSTRACT This paper describes the development of a prototype computerised psychiatric social history system that provided both statistics and a draft narrative report in word processed form. Using this prototype system roughly halved the production time for the final report. The paper then goes on to describe a user-friendly shell system developed from the prototype that allows new systems, based on user defined interviewing schedules to be developed with relative ease. This system, called R-Quest(c), allows the user to construct libraries of questions, tables and lists which can be drawn upon to construct new questionnaires.