The POE module can be an integral part of the HIS or a separate application that interfaces
with the HIS for admission, discharge and Transfer (ADT) and billing information.
The product that is most sought after today by health care enterprises in the United States
is the Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) for inpatients. This is due to the
increase in medication errors reported by health care providers and also due to regulations
that are calling for a reduction in medication errors (Kohn et al., 2000). To date, few hospitals
have a fully implemented and functional CPOE in place.
CPOE is clinical software designed primarily to automate the physician-ordering
process wherein the physician will now create patient orders electronically and no longer
use paper (Leap Frog Group, 2003). The main focus in the industry today is implementing
an electronic order entry system for inpatients. These systems allow the creation and
maintenance of pre-configured physician order sets that are designed to speed up the
ordering process. There are 8 to 10 vendors in today’s market who offer CPOE solutions.
It is important for a health care enterprise to choose the appropriate vendor solution
because CPOE is at the beginning of the EPR implementation process. It is critical to
ensure that the CPOE can be integrated with other EPR modules, such as clinical documentation,
pharmacy, and laboratory. CPOE solutions today offer real-time decision support
tools such as appropriateness of the order, ordering process, drug interaction and
contra-indications prompts, advisory messages on limits, patient clinical and demographic
information, dose calculators, industry standard drug reference database, and the
ability to perform edits in real time. The decision making tool is a rules-based engine that
can be activated, built on, and modified by the health care enterprise. In operation, the
CPOE module is linked with other applications and databases that provide the necessary
patient information