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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter February 9, 2011

Implementation of computerized add-on testing for hospitalized patients in a large academic medical center

  • Ji Yeon Kim , Irina K. Kamis , Balaji Singh , Shalini Batra , Roberta H. Dixon and Anand S. Dighe EMAIL logo

Abstract

Background: Physician requests for additional testing on an existing laboratory specimen (add-ons) are resource intensive and generally require a phone call to the laboratory. Verbal orders such as these have been noted to be associated with errors in accuracy. The aim of this study was to compare a novel computerized system for add-on requests to the prior verbal system.

Method: We compare the computerized add-on request system to the verbal system with respect to order completeness and workflow.

Results: We demonstrate that the computerized add-on system resulted in the complete in-laboratory documentation of the add-on request 100% of the time, compared to 58% with the verbal add-on system. In addition, we show that documentation of a verbal add-on request in the electronic medical record (EMR) occurred for 4% of requests, while in the computerized system EMR documentation occurred 100% of the time. We further demonstrate that the computerized add-on request process was well accepted by providers and did not significantly change the test mix of the add-on requests.

Conclusions: In computerized physician order entry (CPOE) implementations, add-on order functionality should be considered so these orders are documented in the EMR.


Corresponding author: Anand S. Dighe, Massachusetts General Hospital, Bigelow Building, Room 510, 55 Fruit Street, Boston, MA 02114, USA Phone: +617-726-7902, Fax: +617-726-9206

Received: 2010-9-2
Accepted: 2010-12-16
Published Online: 2011-02-09
Published in Print: 2011-05-01

©2011 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin New York

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