Efficiency of Mobile App Compared to conventional method of preanesthetic Assessment: A Pilot Study

Pre-anesthesia evaluation (PAE) allows discovery of conditions affecting peri-operative planning. Inadequate pre-anesthesia evaluation is associated with delays, cancellations and preventable adverse events. Use of mobile app for pre-anaesthetic evaluation may reduce the time and efforts required by a patient for pre-anesthetic evaluation. Study will be conducted after approval from the Institute’s ethical committee and obtaining written informed consent from the patients. Inclusion criteria are patients scheduled for surgical intervention under general anesthesia, adult patients (18-65 yrs) of either sex and ASA physical status I and II. Exclusion criteria are patient refusal, illiterate patient or unable to operate mobile phones, history of dyspnea on exertion and history of respiratory disease. Our primary outcome is Efficiency of mobile app compared to conventional method of preanesthetic assessment of patients   undergoing surgical intervention. This will be assessed by identification of patients in which risk factors or disorders remain unidentified during PAE by mobile App. Secondary outcome is Difficult Airway prediction; Patient’s ability to complete the preanesthetic evaluation (PAE) by mobile app; Patient’s willingness to participate in mobile App PAE again; Patient Satisfaction. A patient scheduled for surgical intervention will be enrolled in the study after telephonic interview by an anesthesiology resident. Contact number of the patient will be provided to the anesthesiology resident by the surgical team. The patients enrolled in the study will undergo Mobile app pre- anesthetic Evaluation (PAE) by the mobile App (SGPGI Patient Doctor communication App). the anesthesiology resident will share the App link with the patient. The patient will be advised to answer the PAE questionnaire in the App. The mobile App is developed as a part of the intramural research project A-1- View -PGI/IMP/80/2019 entitled “Development of an App for Patient Doctor Communication minimizing patient OPD visits”. Physical PAE will be done by an anesthesiology resident after the patient has completed PAE by the mobile app. PDF file of physical PAE will be shared with an anesthesiology consultant not involved in the study; the consultant will evaluate the PAE done by the two methods to assess the possibility of incomplete pre-anesthetic evaluation by mobile App. This will be assessed by identification of unrecognized risk factors or disorders during physical PAE done after PAE by mobile App. Sample size calculationhas been done by assuming that a 15% difference in thepossibility of identifying risk factors or disorders during pre-anesthetic evaluation by mobile app as compared to physical method done on the same patient, at minimum two-sided 95%confidence interval and 80% power of the study, estimated sample size is 59. Sample size wascalculated using software "Power analysis and sample size version-16 (PASS-16).