Physician Patient Entry System Essay

Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE)
Improving Process through Technology
Introduction:
Doctors are famous for sloppy scribbling -- and handwritten prescriptions lead to thousands of medication errors each year. Electronics to the rescue: most hospitals that switched to computerized physician order entry systems saw a 66 percent drop in prescription errors.
Illegible handwriting and transcription errors are responsible for as much as 61 percent of medication errors in hospitals. A simple mistake such as putting the decimal point in the wrong place can have serious consequences because a patient's dosage could be 10 times the recommended amount.
Drugs with similar names are another common source of error, such as the pain medication Celebrex and the antidepressant Celexa, or the tranquilizer Zyprexa and the antihistamine Zyrtec. These medication errors are very painful for doctors, as well as the patients. Nobody wants to
Classroom training sessions were arranged at regular intervals. Training was provided by IT representative and the pharmacist. These informal lectures were conducted on the actual desktop projected onto a larger screen and day to day problems were solved as raised by physicians. In addition to aiding physicians in becoming proficient users of CPOE, project team emphasized the critical importance of always listening to and quickly responding to physician issues and questions. Individualized one-on-one training was also made available. Training was required for all newly recruited physicians and became incorporated into orientation schedule. Data was collected for the usage of CPOE for all the physicians and those who were reluctant to use CPOE were reached out and further training and support was offered. System user manual was made available via the intranet. An animated power point presentation on how to use CPOE was also available on the