CPOE, alerts and workflow: taking stock of ten years research at Erasmus MC

Ten years ago research of the impact of health information technology (HIT) on medical work practices started at Erasmus MC. The research is characterized by practice driven field research. From the beginning computerized physician order entry systems (CPOE) were a major topic. Research questions were how implementation of CPOE could be understood, how physicians were responding to reminders and alerts and how CPOE impacted professional workflow and collaboration. Studies of CPOE implementation aimed to understand why the adoption rate is so low and riddled with difficulties. Studies of reminders and alerts addressed the problem of alert fatigue. Finally, studies of workflow explored how CPOE influenced clinical workflow and how simplistic and linear models underlying CPOE may lead to poor designed systems and even compromise patient safety. Findings include the need for a shared understanding of medical challenges when implementing CPOE, conceptual models to understand alert fatigue and medical workflow and the impossibility of agreeing which alerts to suppress hospital-wide. The underlying research principle is the sociotechnical approach, which stipulates that technology, people and organizations should be studied from a single theoretical framework. This paper summarizes the results of ten years of research.