[Computer-based hospital transfusion process: why and how does one establish a link between continuous quality improvement and clinical information system?].

Within a hospital, the need for a computer-based transfusion system has became mandatory. It facilitates the tracing of healthcare activities, which is the basis of the security of the care and a functional element of continuous quality improvement procedures. In order to implement this traceability, reactive and real-time information systems are needed close to healthcare participants, which is not the case of current information systems which rely on a recorded collection of data, far from the needs of the caregiver, and mainly answering to an objective evaluation of results. In the context of continuous quality improvement programmes started in our hospital, hemovigilance was the first to use a process analysis approach, from the prescription of blood units to their administration and follow-up. Several questions arise from this: 1) how to use the process analysis work to specify the users' needs of a generalized and real-time transfusion information system? 2) how to spread this model to other healthcare activities? 3) how to integrate or interface the whole of these quality programmes with a clinical information system? A user-centered methodology was used, based on 'usage cases'. For each step of the transfusion process, this method allowed us to specify participants, data necessary for an activity (observed, deduced or decision-support data), data issuing from the activity, roles (the interaction between user and activity) and functions (the result of the interaction between user and activity).