Digitizing Data Management for Intraoperative Neuromonitoring

Intraoperative neurophysiological monitoring (IOM) enables a function-preserving surgical strategy for surgeries of brain or spinal cord pathologies by neurophysiological measurements. However, the IOM data management at neurosurgical institutions are often either not digitized or inefficient in terms of collecting, storing and processing of IOM data. Here, we describe the development of a web application, called IOM-Manager, as a first step towards the complete digitization of the IOM workflow. The web application is used for structured protocoling based on standardized protocol entry catalog, data archiving, and data analysis. These functionalities are based on the results of the requirement engineering of a process analysis, a survey with potential users and a market analysis. A usability test with one IOM team indicated the IOM-Manager and its other components can in fact solve many problems of existing solutions.