According to the latest survey from The Leapfrog Group, more hospitals are adopting computerized physician order entry (CPOE) systems to reduce medication errors. Meanwhile, the predicted survival rates for high-risk procedures and the hospital-acquired injury and infection rates for the hospitals vary significantly, according to the results of the 2013 hospital survey that was released last Friday.

An all-time high number of hospitals participated in the survey this year — 1,437 hospitals or 37 percent of hospitals nationwide, which was a 19 percent increase from 2012. The number of participants rose because health care purchasers and employer coalitions are now asking hospitals to participate in the survey.

“Employers are increasingly being confident about the fact that they can demand this information from hospitals,” Erica Mobley, director of communications and development at Leapfrog, told DOTmed News. “Large employers are spending millions and millions of dollars on these facilities and want to know how they’re performing.”

But the hospitals are also realizing that they must become more transparent with data. “I think a lot of hospitals are realizing that it’s a new era of transparency in health care and it’s not acceptable to hide and not be willing to share data and share your information,” said Mobley.

Leapfrog has been tracking how many hospitals implemented CPOE systems since 2001. They designed a standard that states that 75 percent of inpatient medications should be ordered through a CPOE system that includes decision support software.

Leapfrog has an evaluation tool that evaluates how well the hospitals’ CPOE systems work. “It’s not enough, we don’t think, just to know how frequently it’s used or the degree to which it’s implemented,” said Mobley. “It’s also important to figure out how well it works.”

In order to gauge the degree of implementation, each hospital participating in the survey received a set of fictitious patients and they were asked to enter doses into the CPOE system in order to test how well the system reacts to potential errors.

They found that 616 hospitals — 43 percent — met their standard for CPOE, which is a significant increase from the 113 hospitals that met the standard in 2009. They attribute the increase to the financial incentives for “meaningful use” of health information technology.

“[The systems are] incredibly expensive and so a lot of hospitals didn’t have the resources to use them until some of this federal funding came in,” said Mobley.

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