The shortage of Spanish-speaking child psychiatrists has compromised the delivery of mental health care. At our institution the average non-English speaking patient waits 500% longer than English speaking referrals to receive a psychiatric evaluation. The projection is for the dilemma to increase in severity: 1) the size of the Hispanic population is increasing, and 2) the policy making foreign medical school graduates unwelcome in the United States eliminates one of the principle sources of bilingual physicians. In summary, the gap between the number of bilingual child psychiatrists and the size of the non-English speaking population is reaching crisis proportions, and the trend appears to be worsening. When confronted with similar man-power shortages, private industries and the Department of Defense (D.O.D.) frequently turn to technological solutions. Similarly, finding a viable solution to the aforementioned problem is the objective of this research. Integrating the current version of the NIMH Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children (parent edition) with an intelligent computer system may serve to alleviate the crisis if three criteria prove true: 1) When compared with evaluation by a bilingual clinician, the bilingual diagnostic computer system will elicit identical responses from the subjects. 2) The proposed system can help alleviate the backlog of non-English speaking patients awaiting evaluation. 3) The subjects' response to the bilingual computer interview will be perceived as favorably as their experience with the bilingual clinician.
