Today is my last day in Lille (well, I fly home tomorrow, but my last working day). I was here two weeks during the summer, and now a second set of two weeks have almost passed.

So, what am I doing here? The main focus for my visit to France has been to visit the Clinical Investigation Center for Innovative Technologies (CIC-IT) and the Evalab unit at CIC-IT in Lille. Certified in January 2008 by the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research (INSERM) and the Ministry of Health (Department of Hospital and Health Care Organization), the Clinical Investigation Center for Innovative Technologies (CIC-IT) is a functional unit of the Lille university Hospital and the University of Lille (Faculty of Medicine). It has a national specific expertise in innovation and usage issues. The CIC-IT is to be used by scientists, industrial partners and healthcare managers when the design, development and implementation of innovative technologies raise Human Factors problems such as usability difficulties, safety problems or difficult adoption from the intended users (physicians, nurses, patients, etc.).

The Evalab is part of the CIC-IT of Lille. It was the first usability lab dedicated to Health Information Technologies (HIT) created in Europe. It aims at improving the quality of the services and products generated by the new technologies, used by the healthcare professionals, the patients and their family/helpers.

Last year I applied for funding from the Institut Francais Suède’s mobility program FRÖ and was funded to visit Lille. And it has been great! We have had such interesting discussions on usability, the role of usability or human factors experts in healthcare organizations, patients’ access to their electronic health records and different methods for evaluating usability. We have held a panel together at MIE2016 in Munich, and are now working on submitting a workshop proposal for MIE2017 in Manchester, which will hopefully lead to new ideas and further collaboration in the future.

So I return back to Sweden with new energy, new ideas and a suitcase full of choclate and macarons – academic life is good!