A survey of U.S.A. acute care hospitals' computer-based provider order entry system infusion levels

We developed and fielded a survey to help clinical information system designers, developers, and implementers better understand the infusion level, or the extent and sophistication of CPOE feature availability and use by clinicians within acute care hospitals across the United States of America. In the 176 responding hospitals, we found that CPOE had been in place a median of 5 years and that the median percentage of orders entered electronically was 90.5%. Greater than 96% of the sites used CPOE to enter pharmacy, laboratory and imaging orders; 82% were able to access all aspects of the clinical information system with a single sign-on; 86% of the respondents had order sets, drug-drug interaction warnings, and pop-up alerts even though nearly all hospitals were community hospitals with commercial systems; and 90% had a CPOE committee with a clinician representative in place. While CPOE has not been widely adopted after over 30 years of experimentation, there is still much that can be learned from this relatively small number of highly infused (with CPOE and clinical decision support) organizations.