SBIR Phase I: DIAGNOSTICA: Clinician's Assistant for Diagnostics and Treatment Planning in Mental Health

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project focuses on computational aspects of Diagnostica, an application that provides advanced diagnostic decision support and outcome monitoring for individual mental health clinicians without significantly altering accepted clinical practices. A critical problem in mental health care is that while a definitive standard for making formal diagnoses exists (as encoded in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), its complexity prevents community clinicians from utilizing it effectively. This project will develop the computational machinery needed to model and process the temporal and severity aspects of DSM-IV. Diagnostica's reasoning capabilities will be implemented by combining techniques drawn from constraint processing, non-monotonic reasoning and logic programming. Diagnostica will use explicit temporal and severity measures, thereby enabling rigorous DSM-IV diagnostic work in the normal course of documenting a clinical encounter. With increasing pressure by third party payers for detailed DSM-IV based documentation and the need to minimize misdiagnosis, a majority of clinicians may be expected to use DSM-IV-based systems over the next decade. By enabling the improvement of the quality of mental health diagnosis, widespread use of Diagnostica will dramatically improve the quality of care, enable the aggregation of community data for public health improvement, and spur further development of the DSM rule base.