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.
