Were there any challenges related to staff adoption of the new technologies?
If so, what has Lehigh Valley Hospital done to help staff members with the transition? Kromis: At first, from many people we heard things like, “I’ve been doing this for 20 years. I don’t need this.” We worked with the nurses, and many of them had “a-ha” moments when the scanner caught one of their mistakes. We also made our improvement in harmful errors known to staff. Along with it came the message that this is why we barcode at the bedside and it is the expectation. Now we’ve gone from 39 percent barcoding compliance to 97 percent compliance. For CAPOE, we can build order sets that are tailored to physicians. They don’t want their screens so full that they can’t use it, so we limit it to the most commonly prescribed meds. We also take out overly complicated features to maximize utilization. Back when I worked in another hospital using an early version of CAPOE, the physicians were using wired computers. They’d have to use it, unplug it, then go to another room, repeat. When we imple
