What happens if the output from the patient doesn’t make any sense?
The same thing that happens when you get a spurious laboratory result, clinical judgment is necessary to determine why. This is the main reason that computers will never replace physicians, only help them. Patient provided data must be verified by the clinician since it is raw data directly from the patient. The information must be filtered by the practitioner before it has merit. Usually the practitioner asks open ended questions directed by the input. If the data doesn’t correlate with the clinician’s impression, then there are three possibilities: 1) the patient could not read and pretended to; 2) the patient has an organic brain syndrome, tried to hide his mental disability, and could not manipulate the instructions for the screening, 3) the patient willfully attempted to deceive the program to hide something from the provider, e.g. drug seeking or malingering.
