SOP-Creator - A Software Tool for the Management of Standard Operating Procedures

Motivation

Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) are a significant element of quality assurance in health care. The manageability of SOPs by means of extensive paper-based documents is quite limited, however, in particular in a decentralized competence network with many participants. There is thus a need for computer-assisted SOP management with decentralized editing, central administration, and user-specific functionalities.

Objectives

The objectives and requirements of computer-based SOP support are the:

• administration of SOPs and associated documents
• integration of other reference systems (e.g. the Data Dictionary)
• support for the generation of new SOPs
• SOP presentation adequate for the various user groups, quality grades and reference systems through variable levels of detail
• disclosure of cyclic contents (conflict-free)

Methods and Implementation

The SOP-Creator is a software application based on the VIP Content Management Systems (CMS). For the input, modification and verification of SOPs, the VIP HTML-Client has been equipped with SOP-specific expansions. It offers a user-friendly interface for editors and quality assurers. The administration of SOPs takes place centrally in the VIP CMS and comprises a quality assurance cycle, version administration and reference administration. For distributed use over the internet, a web version (HTML) as well as a print version (PDF) of the SOPs are available.

Evaluation

At present the SOP-Creator has been adopted for the creation of 84 SOPs in the application area of malignant lymphoma. For this effort 20 editors at five sites across Germany are working together, and their feedback directly influences the ongoing development of the SOP-Creator.

Further Developments

In addition to the routine maintenance of the SOP-Creators already in use, new capabilities of the underlying CMS are also being implemented in order to expand the SOP-Creators' range of applications and to improve their usability. These include:

• a fine-grained and individually adaptable Quality Assurance Workflow for SOPs
• the semantic compilation of an SOP's contents for user-oriented presentation
• graphic presentation of SOP structures
• expandability with SOP sub-groups

Project team: Matthias Löbe Roland Mücke Thomas Sobik Project management: Prof. Markus Löffler

Contact address:   IMISE Universität Leipzig Härtelstraße 16-18 04107 Leipzig Phone: +49 341 97 16104 Fax: +49 341 97 16130 E-mail: E-Mail-Adresse