Federico Cabitza e Marcello Sarini

Historically, healthcare facilities and practitioners have always been developing a number of more or less institutional and formal artifacts and tools to support the process of disease diagnosis, caregiving and its documentation so as to manage the unfolding of multiple and concomitant clinical cases towards a fast and definitive recovery (cf. e.g., [3,16]). At the very beginning of last century, clinical records were introduced by hospital management to increase communication between clinicians, improve collaboration and retain into narrative records their ability to daily solve even complex problems of their patients [5]. At first doctors were very averse to the new assignment of documenting care for others than themselves and to the new interference in their job that required them additional secretarial work. Nevertheless, doctors slowly reconciled to the record. They slowly began to see this tool as an indispensable resource to cope with the whole set of patients they were responsible of and the with complexity of each single case that grew in parallel with the development of the pharmaceutics industry and the complexity of its supply.