The University Hospital of Lille has developed an Integrated Hospital Information System to improve the management of information within the medical units and to facilitate the communication of data between these units. The system is centred on the patient. The physicians, after the first benefit of the basic procedures, want to develop or to acquire complementary applications that could help them in their daily work, to improve the diagnosis or treatment processes. The European ISAR programme tried to integrate 6 AIM Projects on a HIS. These Projects were elicited from 6 European consortiums, able to provide prototypes or pre-competitive products.

ISAR is not a purely technical integration project. The issue is not just to run a new and foreign device. It is, for the clinical departments, to accommodate the AIM prototypes within their own clinical activities, taking into account the existing or planned information technology infrastructure and services of the Lille CHRU hospital information system.

To solve these problems, ISAR developed a methodology for technical, organisational and ergonomic integration.