Leapfrog offers its recommendations based on CPOE Evaluation Tool findings. 

1. Alongside federal investment in technology, and as part of the definition of meaningful use, there must be a testing and monitoring component for all technology adoption in hospitals.
2. We must find a way to share information transparently about best practices for adoption of health information technology in hospitals. Competition is healthy, but in the case of IT adoption, collaboration is far better. Technology systems are not “plug and play.” They require thoughtful engagement by all stakeholders in the hospital system. Currently hospitals aiming to invest in CPOE or other HIT systems either rely on their vendor to map an adoption process or invent their own. This is not efficient and results in the performance variation that these studies found. Leapfrog is working with the respected Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMMS) to formulate a set of best practices and disseminate them publicly.
3. Leapfrog and our purchaser members will continue to push for more hospitals to adopt CPOE. The evidence that CPOE saves lives and prevents the most common adverse event in hospitals – medication errors – remains abundant and urgent. CPOE systems can reduce adverse drug events by up to 88 percent, preventing three million serious medication errors in the U.S. each year, saving billions of dollars and alleviating significant human suffering. As medicine grows more complex, it will not be adequate to rely on the individual memories of each and every clinician to assure a plethora of medication errors are avoided. We will need to rely on advancing technology to support clinicians, and we will need to improve on the performance of that technology over time.