Design and evaluation of ergonomic methods and tools for the easy entry of textual and graphical data in the medical electronic record – SIFADO (Saisie Informatique FAcile des D

Physicians use natural language to record patient data in electronic medical files but they scarcely ever use the coding tools available to them as they find them awkward. As a consequence they do not use standard terminological repositories to encode their inputs, thus failing to meet an essential requirement for the interoperability of health information systems.

This hinders accessing and using patients' information for all the automated patient support assistance and medical decision making applications (e.g., aids to therapeutic strategy, contra-indications checking for prescription, patient record synthesis), with plausibly important detrimental effects on individual patients' fates as well as on Public Health indicators.

The SIFaDo project intends to design and evaluate methods and tools to make immediately useful and easy -- even possibly fun -- the entry of textual or graphical data to be structured and coded in electronic medical files. It gathers the competences of nine partners : four academic partners from medical and scientific institutions (Medical Informatics, Human-Machine Interfaces, Ergonomics), four industrial partners (Medical Practice Software, Hospital Information Systems, Shared Medical Records, Health Knowledge Bases), and a medical society of general practitioners.

The SIFaDo project will bring the design of original methods for the entry of structured and encoded medical data based on a combination of innovating approaches (e.g., reducing the dimension of search spaces for classification, integrating probability models and statistical data, using graphical user interfaces some of which will be based on the iconic language VCM developed by one of the partners). The proposal and the selection of methods will depend on the analysis of users' needs and will be based on the ergonomic evaluation of these methods (user-centric design). Once selected, the methods will be specified and implemented by the industrial partners. The resources needed for the implementation will be made available in a "resource box". The implemented tools will be evaluated in terms of user performance, of encoding quality, and of long term use.

The selected methods and the results of their evaluation will constitute the scientific output of this project. The industrial output will consist in several commercial software products for general medical practice and hospital medicine, together with an acquired expertise on project management in the domain of shared medical records.