A study of the communication notes for two asynchronous collaborative activities.

Introduction: To build relevant tools for Health Care Professionals, we must study and understand their practices. This paper discusses the way they leave traces in the Patient Record to help asynchronous collaboration, elaborating new documents or adding annotations.

Methods: We compared the results of two studies about the various writing strategies used by the Health Care Professionals to capture knowledge in the Patient Records. The first study deals with the information written by the nurses in a textbook during homecare situations. The second one deals with the annotations left by all the practitioners to complete the documents of the patient record in a hospital ward.

Results: We have found some invariants in these two situations. An interpretation model based on four levels: Communication Context, Communication Object, Value of Communication and Value of Cooperation, is proposed in order to describe and to index the characteristics of the Communication Notes.