Application software for managing reservations and optimizing resources in interventional radiology rooms: from creation to clinical practice

Managing exam booking agendas and optimizing time in surgical rooms is a challenge for all hospitals, and with the increase in the number of procedures over the years, the problem has also extended to Interventional Radiology rooms. The purpose of this work consisted in the description of the design, implementation and evaluation phases of an application software for the management of reservations and the optimization of resources in interventional radiology rooms, with an integrated database for archiving according to keywords. After planning the guidelines for managing Patient bookings in the two Interventional Radiology rooms, we have created a software based on PHP language (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor). For the creation of the software we used only Open Source programs or software regularly distributed free of charge. The software took 21 days to create, using Open Source applications such as Apache, Mysql and PHP. The software created allows you to quickly organize the exams in the rooms, taking into account the availability of the Anesthesiologist and Operators throughout the working day. From September 2013 to January 2020, 20846 procedures were entered, 11969 reservations were modified and 1143 notes or notices were entered by the 45 users created. A total of 158651 pages were visited (on average 2060 pages per month). We believe that with the appropriate tools, easily available on the web, even free of charge, it is possible to create applications that allow a better organization of the rooms with considerable savings both in terms of time and costs.