Saturday, December 31, 2005

Top ten issues in hospital medicine for 2005, ------issue 6

Electronic medical records and computerized physician order entry
Electronic medical records (EMR) and computerized physician order entry (CPOE) hold great promise, and hospitalists are expected to be leaders in the adoption of these technologies. The news this year, however, was not all good. As I posted earlier this month, adoption of EMR in Hawaii has been problematic. In March there was this study in JAMA suggesting that CPOE may actually increase errors. Meanwhile the system at Vanderbilt seems to be working well as reported in this podcast interview at Soundpractice.

Perhaps Medpundit summed it up best this year in saying “Successful implementation an electronic medical record requires a tremendous amount of cooperation and consultation with the people who are going to be using it. The bigger the group, the harder that's going to be.”

2 comments:

james gaulte said...

Thanks for your top 10 series.Each segment is very well done and useful.

Anonymous said...

just want to say my daugheters pediatrician computerize her prescription to the pharmacy...which I thought was cool..until I got there to find the dosage wrong..being a nurse...my daughter 6yrs old and 37lbs as well as a alert pharmacistit was caught. and corrected by us and then the md was notified. patricia