Expert Panel Discussion on The Road to CPOE

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Edward Koschka

Our GE legacy system is sunset. We are in the process of achieving 2011 compliance on this system but do not feel it provides the flexibility we need to comply with 2013 requirements and are in the process of upgrading this system.

Lee Carmen

Our EMR is not able to meet our expected future needs in its current version, but we are confident our vendor is listening to our needs and is factoring those needs into their product development.

Dave Baumgardner

We are currently upgrading to MEDITECH 5.6.4 in 2011 and then migrating to 6.0 between 2013 and 2014. We feel the current product maturity is sufficient; the product has more installs than any other vendor. We do have concerns about the user interface for the physicians, however.

David Fiser

We also believe that our vendor CPOE solution has reached an appropriate maturity level. As the CPOE systems have been maturing, we have been building clinical infrastructure for multiple years beginning with bedside charting, pharmacy and pharmacy robot integration, bedside medication administration and clinical data repository, among other things. CPOE fits very nicely into our strategy of building a comprehensive electronic health record.

Jeff Bell

That is great, David. It sounds like CPOE will allow you to close the loop on medication administration.

David Fiser

Yes, it will. Currently, pharmacy orders are handwritten and faxed down to the pharmacy system. The handwritten order is then reviewed and re-entered in the pharmacy application. The new CPOE system will allow orders to go directly into the pharmacy application. The handwritten order, which can be error prone, will be eliminated and replaced with electronic orders.

Lee Carmen

At University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, we are still working to find the optimal solution to support adoption. At our institution, use of the enterprise EMR is a requirement for all physicians. After 14 months of using the tool, many physicians are now becoming very engaged in learning how to better utilize the system to support their practices. Many are starting to embrace the notion of predefined order sets and other features of the EMR.