A hypertext information system for standard operating procedures in haematological intensive care.

In times of cost reduction efforts the role of standard operating procedures for both medical and nursing procedures gets increasing importance. Such standards are necessary if the quality of patient care shall not suffer but even improve. While some sophisticated approaches are coming up with generation of clinical processes from formal protocol models in connection with documentation systems the clinical practice actually looks quite different: Paper-based "operating standards" are used in day-to-day work, if any. In this paper a simple and powerful WWW-based hypertext information system for easy provision and maintenance of nursing standards is presented.