Background: The quality assurance of care and patient safety, with increasing cost pressure and performance levels is of major importance in the high-risk and high cost area of the operating room (OR). Standard operating procedures (SOP) are an established tool for structuring and standardization of the clinical treatment pathways and show multiple benefits for quality assurance and process optimization.
Objectives: An internal project was initiated in the department of anesthesiology and a continuous improvement process was carried out to build up a comprehensive SOP library.
Material and methods: In the first step the spectrum of procedures in anesthesiology was transferred to PDF-based SOPs. The further development to an app-based SOP library (Aesculapp) was due to the high resource expenditure for the administration and maintenance of the large PDF-based SOP collection and to deficits in the mobile availability. The next developmental stage, the SOP healthcare information assistant (SOPHIA) included a simplified and advanced update feature, an archive feature previously missing and notably the possibility to share the SOP library with other departments including the option to adapt each SOP to the individual situation. A survey of the personnel showed that the app-based allocation of SOPs (Aesculapp, SOPHIA) had a higher acceptance than the PDF-based developmental stage SOP form.
Conclusion: The SOP management system SOPHIA combines the benefits of the forerunner version Aesculapp with improved options for intradepartmental maintenance and administration of the SOPs and the possibility of an export and editing function for interinstitutional exchange of SOPs.
Keywords: Patient safety; Process quality; Quality of care; SOP; Standardization.