Informatics Core Services

Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is a relatively new and increasingly popular technology that uses the telephone to administer survey questions. The respondent answers each question by pressing the
keys on the telephone keypad, and responses are entered automatically in a database.

IVR enjoys a number of advantages over traditional face-to-face interviews, including interview consistency, access to difficult-to-reach populations such as recovering drug users and alcoholics and low-income public clinic patients, immediate data availability and accessibility, and convenience both for respondents and investigators.
In view of these advantages, it is not surprising that IVR has been used in a wide variety of studies, ranging from symptom and alcohol consumption monitoring to those involving psychological assessment and treatment.

The IVR at the UCHC GCRC was established in the Fall 2002. The initial system was comprised of a computer workstation, a 4-port voice card (Intel Dialogic Voice Board DIALOG/4), four telephone lines, and SmartQ/dialQuest Integrated Development Environment (IDE) from Telesage, Inc. Figure 1 below show a schematic representation of the IVR hardware and detailed description of the system follows. The IVR system has grown to include 7 workstations with 50 telephone lines, supporting 2 pilot and 8 funded studies (Table 1). Since its inception, 25,000 calls totaling over 1 million data point have been made to the system. The IVR facility has been setup to be scalable to meet future demands. The system has a maximum capacity of 120 telephone lines.

Figure 1. Anatomy of the IVR System