Maintaining excellence in physician nurse communication with CPOE: A nursing informatics team approach

Designing and implementing CPOE systems is difficult, presenting many challenges to overcome related to workflow redesign. As part of the Mayo Clinic Arizona CPOE design and implementation, it was recognized that physicians would be placing inpatient orders from multiple locations; therefore nurses no longer would have the usual visual clues to identify new physician orders. This could easily lead to a delay in implementing orders that require immediate action. To address this, a multidisciplinary team evaluated various communication options and designed two in-house Web-based applications to solve the communication gap. One application will provide staff nurses with visual alerts for stat and routine orders as they are processed in real time. A second application is a Web-based link to the nursing assignment sheets, which will give physicians and support staff access to staff nurse assignments and phone numbers, specific to each nursing unit.