User:TMSWhite

Dr. Tom White is very impressed with LimeSurvey, and hopes to work with the development team to extend its functionality to better support the needs of the epidemiological research community.  Specifically, he wants LimeSurvey to easily support (a) more complex scoring and conditional branching, and (b) tailoring of questions, answers, and reports.  He also wants to re-tool his existing "Winter Depression" questionnaires (http://www.cet.org/eng/Tools_ENG.html) into LimeSurvey in about a dozen languages.

Dr. Tom White has helped set the direction for computerized survey research in the USA since 1999.  He has over 20 peer-reviewed publications and presentations to Informatics and clinical audiences, plus Health IT agencies within the US Federal Government.  He is currently an Associate Professor at Columbia University, a Bureau Director for the New York State Office of Mental Health, and a member of several international standards bodies including LOINC and HL7.  He earned his MD and MS (Neuroscience) degrees from Cornell University, and his MA (Informatics) from Columbia University.

In 1999, Dr. White built Dialogix, a Java-based system to speed the development and deployment of complex epidemiological assessment and diagnostic instruments.  Dialogix has supported over $100 million dollars in NIH-funded epidemiological research.  Dialogix is multi-lingual, and supports complex conditional branching logic; micro-tailoring/piping of questions, answers, and reports; complex scoring; and export to SAS and SPSS.  Most of the deployed surveys are 2+ hours long, and contain 500-3500 questions, depending upon the branching path taken by the survey respondents.  Extensions to Dialogix have been adopted by the US Federal Government and standards bodies (LOINC, SNOMED, HL7, HIMSS IHE) as the standard for representing assessment instruments.

However, Dr. White no longer has the time to support Dialogix or continue its development.  After reviewing the market and discovering that there are no commercial tools that support the range of functionality he needs, he found that LimeSurvey and Project REDCap come closest to supporting his needs.  Given how well established and supported LimeSurvey is, he decided to work with the LimeSurvey team to find a way to add in the functionality his current customers needs without damaging LimeSurvey's ability to support its current customer base.  Given how frequently others have asked for this sort of functionality, he hopes the the LimeSurvey team and users will find these extension ideas useful.

More information about Dr. Tom White can be found here:

- Dialogix description:  http://www.tomwhitemd.com/dialogix

- Tutorial on survey instruments and national standards:  http://www.tomwhitemd.com/node/76

- LinkedIn profile:  http://www.linkedin.com/in/tomwhitemd