Impact of computerized physician order entry on physician time

• HIT Description: Computerized physician order entry. More info...
  
• Purpose of Study: Evaluate the effect of computerized physician order entry on housestaff time.
  
• Years of study: Not Available
  
• Study Design: Pre-Post
  
• Outcomes: Impact on efficiency, utilization, costs
  

• Settings: Medical interns and surgical participated in this study, which took place in a tertiary-care hospital in Boston, Massachusetts.
• Intervention: An inpatient computerized physician order entry.
• Evaluation Method: The measure of time spent ordering or in activities which might be simplified using order entry, and evaluation of specific types of ordering.
• Barriers: Housestaff took twice as long writing orders using the computerized physician order entry. The authors suggested implementing strategies to reduce the writing time of one-time orders.
• Changes in efficiency and productivity: For both medical and surgical house officers, writing orders on the computer took about twice as long (p 0.001), or 44 minutes for medical and 73 minutes for surgical house officers. Medical house officers, but not surgeons, recovered about half this time because some administrative tasks--e.g. looking for charts--were made easier: 9.4-6.1% (p 0.001), 27 minutes per day. Within types of orders, sets of stereotyped orders took much less time with order entry (3.1% before vs. 1.7% after), but one-time orders took longer (2.2% before vs. 7.2% after).