Greedy topological sorting on questionnaire directed acyclic graph and its application in patient surveys
Guangming Xing, Qinglong Sun · 2015
With the wide adaption of EMR systems in healthcare, patient questionnaires become more relevant for data collection like pre-visit notes. In this paper, we introduce questionnaire directed acyclic graph(QDAG) to model a questionnaire. Based on QDAG, we studied optimizing the sequence of questions to be presented to the patient to reduce the number of needed answers by using greedy topological sorting. Our solution not only reduces the time needed to complete a questionnaire, but also may lead to results with better quality by reducing user fatigues. Experimental studies on synthesized data set indicated a 15% reduction on the numbers of answers needed.