Will CPOE Benefit Your Hospital?
By Katie Wike, contributing writer
Stage 2 Meaningful Use requires Computerized Physician Order Entry, a requirement that will have a direct impact on the bottom line
Stage 2 Meaningful Use will require eligible and critical access hospitals to exceed 60 percent of medication, 30 percent of laboratory, and 30 percent of radiology orders Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) use for unique patients with at least one medication. According to EHRIntelligence, “Despite its importance for meaningful users, CPOE adoption and use has other important benefits for health systems and hospitals, which demonstrate the significant value of this EHR functionality.”
Helen Thompson, VP and CIO at NCH Healthcare System, told EHRIntelligence, “With the increase in CPOE, what we’re seeing is a higher degree of visibility into what’s happening with our patients across the continuum of care. We’re seeing an increase in physician engagement in the care delivery model and more of a team approach to the healthcare delivery than we had before. Those are the high-level quality measures.”
CPOE has financial benefits too, as using an electronic input system as opposed to paper documentation is a more efficient way of doing business. “Quantifiably, I can tell you that we have seen a 40 percent drop in the documents that we needed to scan; and that’s huge because every time somebody touches that piece of paper to scan it, that’s expense in the organization,” said Thompson.
Others aren’t as optimistic. Healthcare Informatics reports, “The challenges with CPOE happen to overlap with a rise in the technology's use—the global market for CPOE systems is likely to reach $1.5 billion by 2018, according to a 2012 report by Global Industry Analysts, with the U.S. predicted as the fastest growing market. However, the report said usage still remains low thanks to a lack of commitment and interest from physicians. It found that sporadic incidents of errors from the CPOE systems and other user errors have affected the physicians’ trust in these systems, which threatens further increases in adoption. In addition, the report’s authors said, initial prices of these systems remain prohibitively expensive.”
Healthcare Informatics quotes Delanor Doyle, M.D., CMIO at the Medical Center of Central Georgia, as saying, “Some hospitals simply don’t have the resources. Small hospitals choose not to invest in IT infrastructure and training. Some of them are not electronic at all, and are still doing everything on paper except for pharmacy. You’re going to tell them that now you have to jump from [paper] to an electronic system in terms of documentation as well as order entry? Well many of them just don’t see how they are going to do that.”
Healthcare Informatics notes physicians reluctance to CPOE, quoting Doyle as saying, “In the physician community, there has not been significant buy-in. It will take retirement of a number of physicians, and we do know we will lose several in the next few years to death, disability, or retirement. The average age of physicians in Georgia is 55, so we’re top heavy. The more we get physicians coming into [the industry] with computers in their hands, the better.”