Contributions of Activity Ergonomics to Design a Virtual Tool for Sharing Mental Health Care

The goal of this paper is to illustrate the contributions generated by Activity Ergonomics (AE) to the participatory design process of an EHR created to support collaborative mental health care of children and youth in the city of Rio de Janeiro. It is qualitative research based on the theoretical framework of AE. In this paper we will present the results of the first step of this research. This preliminary stage used as a form of data collection interviews with professionals from three sectors of the mental health care network of children and youth within Brazil. An analysis of the interviews demonstrated that mental health collaborative care encompasses an intersectoral network of services that are articulated in the construction of therapeutic projects. This type of organization requires an intense exchange of information between experts from distinct fields, like social workers, educators and health care professionals. In fostering the diverse professional realities, there is a difficulty to overcome the challenge of sharing information, due in part to the combination and inundation of the individual accounts. In addition, the difficulties identified in the use of the old device were: fear of wrongly inputting the data into the system, rework, incomprehension of the codes used as landmarks to cases. The useful features identified by the workers for a new tool were: access through smartphones, possibility of choosing to consult a summary of the cases or more detailed information, dynamic communication between the services and generation of alerts for urgent situations.