Anticlue

Barriers to CPOE

Health affairs has a couple of hints on overcoming the barrier to a CPOE implementation. The complete article is found here.

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Overcoming resistance.
(1) Strong leadership: Hospital leaders need to be firm believers in the benefits of CPOE and demonstrate a commitment to the implementation. They need to be in a position to deal with the changes that arrive with a CPOE implementation.
(2) Identifying physician champions: Their knowledge of their workflow assist tremendously in selecting a vendor, and they can help facilitate the benefits of the system and communicate the physicians population concerns to the project implementation team.
(3) Addressing workflow concerns: Listening to the customer population is essential here, in addition to having adequate training and assistance available.
(4) Leveraging house staff or hospitalists: The simple fact is physicians-in-training have a higher level of comfort with technology. They can provide valuable feed back on how to improve the product.
Overcoming the high cost of CPOE
(1) Realign the hospital’s priorities to focus on patient safety: Simply reducing medical errors interests everyone.
(2) Measure CPOE’s impact on hospital efficiency: A CPOE implementation may correlate directly to improved hospital efficiency. Some benefits to look for are reduced delays in patient care through improved communication and standardized procedures. So start collecting the baseline data sooner than later, the quality management department can be a huge aide.
(3) Improve system interoperability: Basically standardize in the industry what CPOE systems interoperability means. If systems can work well together and communicate well, plugging a CPOE in place is easier that the other scenario.
(4) Provide third-party payer incentives for implementing CPOE: CPOE costs are borne entirely by hospitals, however incentives from government or private insurance can help to alleviate som of the costs.
Overcoming vendor and product immaturity.
(1) The vendor must be committed to the CPOE market. Read investing R&D dollars in the CPOE market
(2) The vendor must be ready to identify hospital workflow issues and adapt its product accordingly.
(3) The vendor must commit to a long-term trusting relationship with the hospital, because successful CPOE implementation might take years.