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

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.