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A Novel Open-Source Novel App Improves Anesthesia Operating Room Equipment Supply

  • Systems-Level Quality Improvement
  • Published:
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Abstract

Anesthesiologists are dependent on specialized drugs and equipment being immediately available for patient care. Deficiencies in supplies impact on operating room efficiency and patient safety. In our institution, we do not have anesthesia assistants/aides and depend on general aides to stock anesthesia related equipment which resulted in many shortages. We hypothesized that a mobile app would be useful for tracking and reporting and informing changes to stocking resulting in an improvement in the supply of anesthesia equipment. Following institutional quality improvement approval, we developed an app to collect metrics (which included the last 2 months of paper documentation - September and October 2015) and the first 12 months of the app usage (November 2015 to November 2016). Descriptive statistics were used to analyze data from the app. The primary outcome was the number of reports made over time. Secondary outcomes include the impact of missing items on operating room efficiency and patient safety, the most commonly reported missing items, and the most common actions taken following the discovery of missing items. The app increased the reporting by more than 300% (compared to paper) over the first 2 months. Over the year, 549 items were reported missing. The most common category of missing items was airway related 274 (49.9%). The single most commonly reported missing item was the Wisconsin Laryngoscope Size 1 Blade 95 (17.3%). App users reported the missing item safety impact as high 86 (15.7%) times and efficiency impact as high 117 (21.3%) times. Changes to staffing and supply resulted in a decrease in missing items reported. Our results demonstrate that an app can be useful for reporting, tracking of real-time shortages of anesthesia equipment and is easy to design and implement. Furthermore, the app has generated useful and robust data that has led to staffing changes and improvements in the anesthesia equipment supply chain. The app design and use may be useful in other clinical areas.

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Funding

The study was funded by departmental resources.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anesthesia and Pain Medicine, Hospital for Sick Children, 555 University Avenue, Toronto, ON, M5G 1X8, Canada

    Clyde T. Matava & Michael Tan

  2. Department of Anesthesia, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Clyde T. Matava & Michael Tan

  3. Information Systems, Perioperative Care Unit, Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Joyce Magbitang, Sunny Choi & Sabrina Bhatia

Authors
  1. Clyde T. Matava
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  2. Joyce Magbitang
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  3. Sunny Choi
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  4. Sabrina Bhatia
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  5. Michael Tan
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Clyde T. Matava.

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Conflict of interest

The authors do not have any conflicts of interest to disclose.

Ethics

The study was approved under Quality Initiative by the Institutional Quality and Risk Management on October 7th, 2015.

Additional information

What is already known?

• The availability of anesthesia equipment at the bedside is vital for quality and safe patient care.

What is new?

• We describe the design, development and successful implementation of a novel app for real-time tracking and reporting of anesthesia equipment shortages.

• Reports of missing equipment improved by 300% compared to paper with a high user acceptance of the app.

This article is part of the Topical Collection on Systems-Level Quality Improvement

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Matava, C.T., Magbitang, J., Choi, S. et al. A Novel Open-Source Novel App Improves Anesthesia Operating Room Equipment Supply. J Med Syst 42, 167 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-018-1026-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-018-1026-2

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