Going to a specialist who is looking at your symptoms over a television screen is being used more frequently in medicine. This is particularly useful when a family does not live near a specialist. The purpose of our project is to examine whether clinicians are any more or less accurate in diagnosing autism when interacting with parents and children over a television screen versus seeing the family live. We will have two clinicians watching a child and interviewing the family over television, and two watching live. For half of the children, the clinicians working with the family over TV will conduct the assessment, and for the other half, the clinicians who are with the family will direct the evaluation so we can look at family preferences. We think there will be no difference in accuracy of diagnosis or family preference. If this is true, many families will not have to drive for hours to get an evaluation of a child whom they think might have autism. |
