Multiple time periods in a survey
I am working on a medical application which helps therapists to determine whether patients meet the criteria to be diagnosed with certain illnesses and disorders. For the most part, it works as a survey with lots of multiple choice question which are collected and then analysed by the application afterwards.
The application is only used by expert users, so patients do not have access to it and is used in a face-to-face interview with the patient, where the patient cannot see the screen. Accessibility in terms of screenreaders etc is not an issue, since it will never be a requirement.
An example question would look something like this:
The answers are almost always radio button inputs, only one possible answer. There are some edge cases, but not necessary to mention here.
I have been given a new requirement where I have to try to implement the concept of time periods in this survey. Each question would have two answers, one for a time period, possibly 6 months previously and one for now. The actual time period is irrelevent in the application. It is more important that the interviewer can mark the 'then' and the 'now'.
Until now, they have done this either by creating two separate interviews or by adding the answer to one of the time periods in a note and then compiling the answers manually later. All very difficult and open to human error.
I know how add this feature technically, but my problem is the UI/UX side of things. I have basically landed on a design where there are two vertical radio groups, instead of one.
Again it is expert users we are dealing with, who will receive training. They are used to dealing with time periods in a paper version of the survey but I still think this is not very nice. Does anyone have any other ideas of how to implement this? I'm willing to think completely outside the box, with the understanding that it is important for the user to answer both time periods in the same question and quickly. We have both mouse and keyboard users, but no touch users (at least not yet).
An alternative solution was to have two radio lists side-by-side, duplicating the labels, but many of the questions have answers with lots of text and ends up looking very noisy.
Any alternative ideas would be most welcome!