Background and Goal of the Study
Recent focus on perioperative medicine has been given to assessing personal risks, such as frailty, and optimizing plans through tailored prehabilitation programs and enhance recovery surgery. Developments based on information technologies (IT) could lead the way we approach preoperative care.
We aimed to create a new software application based on structured and non-structured information to achieve, as primary goals: a) Allowing easy and structured risk stratification and determination of frailty in relevant patients, b) Developing of perioperative care bundles and prehabilitation programs, c) Enhancing adherence to guidelines, d) Avoiding unnecessary surgical delays due to human errors in perioperative management of drugs or medical conditions and e) Improving quality of our anaesthesia visit.
Materials and Methods
A multidisciplinary team of anaesthesiologists, nurses and engineers reviewed current literature to comply with perioperative requirements and identify main clinical categories and subsequent risk items. A traffic light alert system and algorithms to personal perioperative recommendations were designed. The team embedded several risk scores, updated guidelines and an automatic clinical system to collect vital sings and clinical data.
Results and Discussion
The result was an IT support system which enhanced preoperative visit. It improved communication with the patient and the involved clinicians, assuring less interpersonal variation and better compliance of local protocols and prehabilitation programs, mainly achieved by a better identification of risky patients. Automatic algorithms reduced human errors and time visit, improving quality of the process.
The support system proved capable of achieving our primary goals, and of being positively accepted by our team.
Conclusion(s)
Nowadays, artificial intelligence is present in the day to day of people so implementing it in the medical field it is a necessity. The designed preoperative application processes structured and non-structured information to accomplish an intelligent risk assessment. Also, there is a need for more multidisciplinary teams including engineers and biomedical engineers, who work together with physicians and give a new approach to medical issues solved by IT solutions.
In summary, application provides a personalized evaluation as an essential tool for the prehabilization program resulting in an enhancement on quality and outcomes.


03 / Development of an IT application to support process automation in thepreoperative assessment oriented to surgical patient prehabilization