You are asked to recommend a way to measure the burden of disease of clinical depression at doctors consultation rooms. Medical practitioners do not have standard record practices and if you are lucky, you will find incomplete medical paper records.

As you know, the number of patients is high so doctors do not have a lot of time to process additional requests for information. In general there is a low degree of computerisation in these medical practices and some doctors prefer good old fax or telephone.

There are obviously ethical issues about sharing or transferring data on this sensitive issue (potential for discrimination of patients by employers) and medicos want to be paid for any form they are asked to fill in in addition to their routine practice.