Healthcare CIO: Final Report

Cited by 64 percent of respondents, computer-based practitioner order entry (CPOE) was identified as the most important healthcare application for their organizations in the next two years. This application was not included as a possible choice in last year’s survey. Clinical information systems, last year’s top response to this question, fell to second place, identified by 53 percent of respondents. This represents a decline of more than 20 percentage points from last year’s response rate of 74 percent. Rounding out the top three is another survey newcomer, bar coded medication management, which was cited by 46 percent of the healthcare IT executives responding to this survey.

There is a general decline in the percentage of respondents who identified application areas as important; every item in this category received fewer responses than they did last year. Specifically, point-of-care clinical decision support, clinical data repositories, computer-based patient records, financial/administrative information systems, and telemedicine systems all dropped by at least 10 percentage points.

For the first time in three years, respondents report that CPR use has increased. More than 19 percent of healthcare IT executives in this survey reported that their organization has a fully operational CPR system in place. By survey definition, this means that healthcare facilities are electronically maintaining information about an individual’s lifetime health status in a completely paperless fashion. This represents an increase from the 13 percent of respondents who answered this question in both 2002 and 2001. Conversely, the number of respondents suggesting that their organization has not yet begun to plan for the use of a CPR declined from 29 percent in 2002 to 20 percent this year.