Control and quality assurance in anaesthesia with a PDMS

This paper presents preliminary results of our experience, over the past three and half years, with an on-line data management system in the OR that charts and documents all features relevant to anaesthesia. We achieved two goals with this system: 1) There has been a considerable improvement in the quantity and quality of documentation, and 2) we have been able to contain costs within our department, despite an increase in workload, by the continuous audit of the quality process in our specialty. Finally we learned that the quality assurance features that we documented and later analyzed, revealed rather conflicting and disappointing results. We believe that this is at least partly due to the reluctance of our staff to accept the concept of quality assurance and quality control in our field.