Evidence-Based Order Sets and CPOE: One Clinician Discusses His Organization's Transition to CPOE

HCI: As we move away from the lone-wolf model of care in terms of physician practice, are physicians accepting this new, collaborative model of care?

Stolle: I believe doctors have for a long time been moving away from the lone-wolf model. An orthopedist will consult with a cardiologist in a heartbeat. I think that what we see is variation within a particular specialty. Meanwhile, physicians are recognizing that there can be agreement on a particular antibiotic or agreement within a specialty on how to treat pneumonia, and that’s OK to treat the patient the same way. And I think that physicians are getting used to that. But what I say is that as we move into standardized order sets, it actually increases, rather than decreases, my obligation to determine how different a particular patient is—I need to recognize when a particular patient has different needs or a different situation. It will never be an excuse for a physician to say, well, I followed that order set.

HCI: Do you feel pretty confident about the 2011 attestation of meaningful use?

Stolle: Yes, fortunately for us, we started down this path quite early, before we knew about meaningful use. So we feel pretty confident about meeting the requirements for 2011.