Quality planning for minimally invasive procedures in neurosurgery

Parallel to the introduction of a minimally invasive method in a department, a documentation system should be introduced for quality management. The first step of quality management of an innovation is quality planning. During the course of patients being treated neuroendoscopically, the pre- and postoperative imaging, the intraoperative video recording, the patient-relevant files and the data of the planning have to be documented. These amounts of data require a multimedial documentation concept. We found the CD-ROM as an optimal documentation media because the discs are both cheap and easily accessible and once stored extremely robust against external influences. Therefore, every neuroendoscopically treated patient is documented with all relevant pictures, files and video sequences on a single CD-ROM.