The challenges of implementing packaged hospital electronic prescribing and medicine administration systems in UK hospitals: premature purchase of immature solutions?

The UK National Health Service is making major efforts to implement Hospital Electronic Prescribing and Medicine Administration (HEPMA) to improve patient safety and quality of care. Substantial public investments have attracted a wide range of UK and overseas suppliers offering Commercial-Off –The-Shelf (COTS) solutions. A lack of (UK) implementation experience and weak supplier-user relationships are reflected in systems with limited configurability, poorly matched to the needs and practices of English hospitals. This situation echoes the history of comparable corporate information infrastructures - Enterprise Resource Planning systems - in the 1980s/1990s. UK government intervention prompted a similar swarming of immature, often unfinished, products into the market. This resulted, in both cases, in protracted and difficult implementation processes as vendors and adopters struggled to get the systems to work and match the circumstances of the adopting organisations. An analysis of the influence of the Installed Base on Information Infrastructures should explore how the evolution of COTS solutions is conditioned by the structure of adopter and vendor ‘communities’

Effects of Two Commercial Electronic Prescribing Systems on Prescribing Error Rates in Hospital In-Patients: A Before and After Study

In a before-and-after study, Johanna Westbrook and colleagues evaluate the change in prescribing error rates after the introduction of two commercial electronic prescribing systems in two Australian hospitals

The Impact of eHealth on the Quality and Safety of Health Care: A Systematic Overview

Aziz Sheikh and colleagues report the findings of their systematic overview that assessed the impact of eHealth solutions on the quality and safety of health care

Possibilities for Healthcare Computing

Advances in computing technology promise to aid in achieving the goals of healthcare. We review how such changes can support each of the goals of healthcare as identified by the U.S. Institute of Medicine: safety, effectiveness, patient-centricity, timeliness, efficiency, and equitability. We also describe current foci of computing technology research aimed at realizing the ambitious goals for health information technology that have been set by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and the Health Reform Act of 2010. Finally, we mention efforts to build health information technologies to support improved healthcare delivery in developing countries.National Library of Medicine (U.S.) (grant U54 LM008748)National Library of Medicine (U.S.) (grant R01 LM009723)National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (U.S.) (grant R01-EB001659)United States. National Coordination Office for Information Technology Research and Development (ONR #10510949