CPOE Acceptance Still Slowed Down By Workflow Changes

Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) adoption rates have been very slow over the last few years, but now, driven by Meaningful Use pressure, more providers are adopting such technology.  That being said, a goodly number of providers still haven’t managed to speed adoption, largely due to doctors’ resistance to changes in workflow, according to a new survey.

The survey, in which vendor Imprivata looked at HIT trends, found that 45 percent of respondents were seeing success with CPOE adoption, with more than half their doctors placing orders using CPOE. This represents substantial progress from a few years ago, when I was seeing studies citing total adoption rates below 10 percent.

That being said, 38 percent of respondents said that less than 25 percent of doctors were using CPOE. What’s slowing things down? Sixty-three percent of respondents said that physician resistance to workflow changes was the hangup.

When asked what technologies could speed adoption of CPOE, respondents said single sign-on (74 percent), virtualized desktops (48 percent) and remote/mobile access (46 percent) were all effective ways to engage physicians in CPOE use. I’m not surprised to hear that single sign-on leads the pack; anything that reduces the hassle factor for users has got to be a winner.

By the way, these trends are fairly consistent previous year’s research, in which the vendor found that 82 percent of respondents considered single sign-on a key factor in CPOE adoption as well as meeting Meaningful Use goals.  It’s worth remembering, when talking about SSO, that Imprivata is a security vendor, so take the prominence of that stat with a grain of salt. Still, I thought it was interesting and probably a valid observation.

By the way, Meditech’s solution ranked well at the top for preferred CPOE systems, with 24 percent using it in their facilities. Cerner and McKesson each had 14 percent of responding firm’s business, Siemens 10 percent and Epic 9 percent.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

1 Comment

  • Nice post. I’m so glad to have found this site. All the posts and discussions I’ve seen have been great!

    To that end, I think that single sign on is great, but I’d be interested to know how many of these groups are trying to develop solutions that work with existing work flows rather than against.

    I read an article just the other week in Health Information IT which stated that 80% of organizations who have implemented or who are currently implementing EHR’s still rely heavily on paper/unstructured data, and that of those 80% their users spend between 63% – 75% of their time dealing with these paper records.

    If paper records aren’t going anywhere, anytime soon, and we all know that we need to digitize data and fulfill the requirements of meaningful use, why aren’t more groups focusing on combining both the vast amounts of paper and unstructured data with the newly generated electronic records? Seems like a huge disconnect to me, and one that if capitalized on, could really mean some meaningful business for these groups. Any thoughts?

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