Knowledge Management and Modelling in Health Care Organizations: the Standard Operating Procedures

Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) in health care organizations are adopted for diagnostic procedures, laboratory examinations and similar, contain standardized prescriptions and are aimed at helping users to request services in the proper way. In the present paper, we describe a model and a software system for the management of SOP’s in a hospital setup (HSOP), derived from similar approaches in the field of clinical protocols. In collaboration with medical experts, we analysed the Procedures Handbook of the City Hospital of Udine, Italy, in order to devise an abstract model for HSOP’s and their management. The model has been described with a XML-schema and implemented with XML. A document workflow model has been extracted also, and realized into a workflow management system called HOPERA. Four categories of users have been considered, with different privileges on the HSOP management. HOPERA is a web application implemented on an open-source platform and includes user authentication, authoring features, archiving and retrieving HSOP’s from an XML-native database, as well as workflow management tools. HOPERA is being tested in its operational environment, within the Udine City Hospital intranet system.