Digitizing the Informed Consent: the Challenges to Design for Practices

This paper reports a user study performed to assess the usability of a Web-based electronic informed consent application called DICE, which is aimed at supporting patients in the process of reading, understanding and using the informed consent as a trigger for further interaction with the team of care givers. In particular, we performed a questionnaire-based study and a series of individual semi-structured interviews to understand whether the application is usable and can be used in real-world settings, respectively. We found that patients could appreciate the availability of interactive tools like DICE, but health professionals believe that its actual adoption in current workflows and practices could be hampered by the chronic lack of time and health operators who could timely address the licit requests that such a tool could bring to light.