Dive Brief:
- More than 80% of eligible hospitals have received incentive payments for Meaningful Use Stage 1, which required that their providers use CPOE for at least 30% of medication orders entered.
- Despite this widespread adoption, in some hospitals—notably rural facilities—are still struggling to get doctors to use CPOE systems.
- Some healthcare leaders feel that CPOE won't reach its highest use until they get better-designed systems which work simply and intuitively.
Dive Insight:
It's all well and good to bring CPOE into a facility, but if the CPOE system is balky and counterintuitive, it could create problems while it solves others. As with any form of hospital IT intended for use by clinicians, it's critical that CPOE be quick and easy to use before leaders rely upon it. But so far, CPOE systems aren't where they should be. Health IT vendors need to solve this problem as soon as they can, before doctors get so burned out on the technology's down side that they refuse to use it.