Framework to Develop Computerized Physician Order Entry System for a Medical Specialty

Abstract

In order to employ information technology for the benefit of healthcare industry a lot of research has been done in the past decades. In this scenario the use of a Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) system has been of primary interest. This is crucial both for patient safety as well as quality of care. But the actual implementation process has had a very slow pace across the globe. Similarly in Pakistan there are a lot of issues in healthcare industry regarding the adoption of information technology in general and CPOE in particular. This is due to the reason that there is a lack of government initiative, technical infrastructure as well as adaptation of CPOE system to the context of Pakistani healthcare sector. This paper proposes a comprehensive framework to develop a Computerized Physician Order Entry System. The novel contribution of this work is that the proposed framework learns and develops a CPOE system based on physician experience. Further on this paper elaborates the working of the framework by showing an instance of it which is based on Ophthalmology specialty. The generated CPOE system spans all the three types of ordersets namely medication prescription, imaging diagnostics and laboratory testing.