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Interoperability and data exchange
The regulatory environment affects several processes and workflows within an organization. One such example is the HITECH act/ meaning ful use rules and how they impacted several processes within a healthcare organization. One of the meaningful use requirements is organizations should be able to exhange patient clinical summaries and discharge summaries with other organizations during transitions of care and on a as needed basis. To provide for this interoperability, organizations should not only have the technology to support this but also have to make changes to their existing workflows/ processes. CPOE is also affected by this, since the clinical summaries should include patient's medications.
So CPOE implementation project should think about what medications needs to be included like only discharge meds or all active meds. It is also important to analyze the existing processes in relation to how discharge meds / home meds are identified and adaptthe necessary processes.
CPOE and Interoperability: CPOE has the potential to improve patient care; today’s applications allow for real-time patient identification, drug dose recommendations, adverse drug reaction notification, checks allergies, and problem lists. Some even look at test, treatment, and diagnosis conflicts. However, none of these important patient safety features will be realized if the varying systems do not “speak” to one another. Clinical Decision Support (CDS) is based on the idea that linking patient data together will assist clinicians with making decisions. CDS is most important during the order entering process, which is why CPOE has the potential to improve patient care, but only if the data is available. The ability to share data among different systems will greatly enhance the benefit of CPOE, a standards-based solution is a crucial factor in addressing this challenge.
Sandra L. Vance, MHA