Prototyping a Personal Health Record Taking Social and Usability Perspectives into Account

This paper presents the process of design involved in prototyping a Personal Health Record (PHR), a patient-centered information and communication hub. As the PHR has to be used by laypeople, we focused on their health related activities (i.e. information management) carried out in the household using a sociological perspective to elicit the infrastructural requirements of the IT. We identified three distinct document management strategies (zero effort, erratic, networking) and ‘translated’ them into three design characteristics: flexibility, adaptability and customizability. We argue that the key to such PHR success is its capability to support the existing activities carried out by laypeople in managing their health record.