Health Information Technology

Certain types of hospitals are more likely to use computerized physician order entry

Hospitals across the country continue to adopt computerized physician order entry (CPOE), although it is still not widespread. A study of hospitals that care for children found that hospitals that became early adopters of CPOE had certain characteristics.

Researchers from the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston reviewed 2 large databases to identify 2,145 hospitals that care for children that used CPOE in 2003. They analyzed hospital characteristics, including hospital type, bed size, ownership, health system affiliation, rural/urban location, and U.S. region. At the time of the study, only 6 percent of the hospitals were using CPOE. Dedicated children's hospitals were six times more likely to be early adopters of CPOE compared with general hospitals with pediatric units. Private for-profit hospitals were 26.5 times more likely than public hospitals to use CPOE, and urban teaching hospitals were nearly 4 times more likely than rural hospitals to use CPOE. The researchers also found geographic differences. Hospitals located in the Northeast, Midwest, and the South were 11.2, 4.2, and 3.1 times respectively more likely to use CPOE than hospitals located out West.

The researchers call for future studies to look at the financial benefits of CPOE use in children's health care. Their study was supported in part by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (HS15679).

See "Early adopters of computerized physician order entry in hospitals that care for children: A picture of US health care shortly after the Institute of Medicine reports on quality," by Ronald J. Teufel II, M.D., M.S.C.R., Abby Swanson Kazley, Ph.D., and William T. Basco Jr., M.D., in the May 2009 Clinical Pediatrics 48(4), pp. 389-396.

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