CPOE

.....only clinician involvement can orchestrates the process by which clinicians are “integrated” in the process of delivery of quality-centered care. An obstructionist clinician team can derail an otherwise successful HIT adoption project and/or your EHR application implementation.

Across the U.S., as healthcare providers implement computerized physician order entry (CPOE) systems, they find themselves dealing with the growing issue of clinical alert fatigue. With patient care alerts proliferating within clinical decision support (CDS) systems, physicians have often come to ignore all alerts. Healthcare IT leaders are working to resolve this important issue to everyone’s benefit, increasingly implementing systems that put out only effective alerts or apply asynchronous alerting strategies.

A nursing symposium session at HIMSS12 made me think back about my magazine’s recent website redesign and transition to a new content management system (the ‘other’ CMS). The HIMSS12 session, Transitioning From a "Best of Breed" to a Single Vendor EHR With CPOE, brought up some great points about change management within organizations and how best to guide people through what can be at times an emotional EHR transition.

St. Louis-based Ascension Health, one of the largest multi-hospital health systems in the U.S., has been a virtual beehive of process and performance improvement in recent years. Leaders of the 81-hospital system (with about 1,400 associated or affiliated care facilities) have been spreading performance improvement —both clinical and non-clinical—across all of its 30-plus regional organizations, known as Health Ministries, all with the goal, in the words of health system leaders, "transform healthcare by providing the highest-quality care to all, with special attention to those who are poor and vulnerable." And a core component of their work has been leveraging information technology to facilitate every type of process improvement in its hospitals and clinics.

The lead medical informaticist at a Toronto hospital discusses the topic of evidence-based order sets and the processes that he and his colleagues have been involved in, in their effort to bring evidence-based ordering, in an automated setting, to their clinical operations.