CPOE Cesspool

An accomplished physician who read my post on CPOE at Memorial Sloan Kettering causing medical errors and near misses, and lack of FD&C Act regulation of health IT medical devices, relates the following:

So I want to stop medications on a patient. The device only allows me to stop one at a time, and for each one, it requires me to type in a reason.

Then, I get another pop up screen to enter my password.

Six clicks and two manual entries to stop an aspirin, not counting the click to get to the med list. [What a valuable use of physician time! - ed.]

Also, I have found that when I want an order for something that is labor intensive to enter, and I ask house staff [trainees - ed.] to do it, I get balking as to why I want that treatment or infusion.

The arguments, I have found, are not really about the treatment. They are about their avoiding the pain in the ass of having to deal with the user unfriendly screens for that order.

The doctors all put up with this.

Yet for some reason this waste of valuable clinician time due to antediluvian HIT design, and even wild goose chases for critical medications such as in my Apr. 5, 2011 post "Mission Hostile Health IT Obstructs Physicians From Ordering Life Saving Drugs In Critical Emergency", are considered "progress" in medicine.

World class medical centers such as Sloan Kettering consider CPOE a "critical vulnerability" towards near misses and outright medical errors.

Still, this IT toxicity is considered "progress" right up to our Department of HHS and POTUS.

Why?

-- SS