Medication errors and adverse drug events (ADEs) are serious hazards for patients all over the world. Reports of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) estimate that a patient in an US-hospital faces at least one medication error per day [1, 2]. Most medication errors, and a majority of ADEs, occur during the prescription phase of the medication cycle [3 –5]. Amongst other approaches, the Institute of...

The importance of health informatics evaluations adopting a pluralist approach which considers the technical as well as the organizational and social aspects of system implementation has been espoused by many researchers. Kaplan's 4Cs evaluation framework presents a lens through which evaluations of clinical systems can be assessed, with a focus on communication, care, control and context. Our ...

Objective: This paper aims to outline a suite of key indicators of Computerised Pathology Order Entry (CPOE) performance, assess their value as measurements of care delivery and their relevance to health professionals and patients. Background: CPOE systems have the potential to deliver substantial effi ciency gains along with improvements in the effectiveness and quality of patient care. Howeve...

Design: The CIM arose from qualitative data collected from four clinical units in two large Australian teaching hospitals. The aim of the study was to explore physicians’ test management work practices associated with the compulsory use of a hospital-wide, mandatory computerized provider order entry (CPOE) system. The dataset consisted of non-participatory observations of physicians using CPOE ...

The computerized physician order entry (CPOE) system has become a primary focus of time and monetary investment in the healthcare arena. This focus is partly due to the need to reduce medical errors that occur due to illegibility, drug interactions, and misplaced decimals. A CPOE system can potentially prevent many of these errors, resulting in a significantly safer healthcare system. However, ...

Computerized physician order entry (CPOE) systems are designed to reduce medication errors. The best evidence to date demonstrates that patients who experience adverse drug events (ADEs) that are preventable have, on average, longer hospital lengths of stay (by approximately two to four-and-a-half days) and higher hospital costs (between $2,000 to almost $5,000). Researchers and practitioners h...

During a planned, rapid deployment of a modified commercial CPOE product to units at an academic pediatric center, problems from users and staff were collected and entered in text format on a commercially available online problem tracking system. Content analysis of 278 collected text reports collected over 3 weeks after the 24-hour rollout period revealed several themes: center-specific implem...

This paper summarizes the foci, activities, methods, and results of a three-year research project. Using a mixed methods approach, the Physician Order Entry Team has identified and categorized the unintended consequences of computerized physician order entry (CPOE). After analyzing 380 examples of unintended adverse consequences, the team described in detail nine major types and conducted a nat...

Insurance denials delay payments for tests to medical institutions and can decrease patient satisfaction due to unexpected billing. Our institution utilizes an ambulatory electronic health record (EHR) for routine clinical care that includes computerized physician order entry (CPOE). At our institution as well as others, considerable cost is associated with inappropriate diagnostic coding of ne...

Though hospitals managers wish to have a unified medication system, physicians continue double registration of prescriptions. The traditions of prescribing both electronically and on paper, as well as the power of the medical record are some of the disregarded elements when introducing a computerized physician order entry system (CPOE). The result is that the explicit goal to eliminate double r...