Fostering the Collaboration Among Healthcare Stakeholders with ICF in Clinical Practice: EasyICF

The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) is a standard framework organized as a top-down taxonomy composed of categories allowing to describe a person's functioning within an environment (physical and social context). ICF aims at helping different clinical professionals and health stakeholders to adopt a common conceptual basis and standard definitions for the description of disabilities and impairments, thus easing the collaboration and clinical information exchange among different actors. ICF is not universally adopted in clinical practice: this is caused mainly by a lack of understanding of ICF and of the operative knowledge to qualify impairments. This work introduces EasyICF, an application designed to facilitate the use of ICF in defining wheelchair users' health conditions for vocational therapists and clinical personnel. EasyICF takes into account the restrictions foreseen in the framework and is designed to support the definition of ICF categories for clinicians with little or no knowledge of the classification and its structure. The application was developed with the help of medical personnel and physical therapists, in a collaborative effort to develop a tool for daily clinical practice in the context of Return to Work.