Phoenix Children's Hospital Adopts Eclipsys Solution

Eclipsys Corp., The Outcomes Company, announced that Phoenix Children's Hospital, a freestanding children's hospital, has successfully completed an enterprise-wide activation of the company's computerized physician order entry (CPOE) system, Sunrise Acute Care.

Eclipsys' CPOE solution, recognized by KLAS as leading the industry in physician adoption in acute care settings, is in broad use at Phoenix Children's, with physicians and other authorized clinical staff placing 99 percent of orders - both medication and non-medication - electronically, the Company noted in a release.

According to Robert L. Meyer, Phoenix Children's president and chief executive officer, a major factor in the hospital's successful CPOE launch was its hybrid rollout methodology. Each department received embedded clinical IT staff support and advanced training for "super users" who were empowered to roll out the system at their own pace, with a common hard go-live deadline.

"Following a mandate from our medical committee to take CPOE hospital-wide, we decided to take a very different approach to physician adoption of electronic order and decision support," said Meyer. "Thanks to the high level of commitment from physician champions who understood how CPOE makes clinical life better, we were able to launch with a 95 percent adoption rate. This was higher than we expected. In fact, achieving this important milestone was truly a joint effort between the physician community and the information technology department. The level of acceptance and appreciation by our physicians really has been a major victory, with everyone aligned toward the same goal."

"This highly successful CPOE project furthers Phoenix Children's ongoing commitment to provide their patients with the most efficient and safe hospital experience possible," said Jay Deady, Eclipsys' executive vice president of Client Solutions. "It also validates our company's stated position on the definition of 'meaningful use' of EHRs under the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act. While some have described the criteria to include CPOE in 2011 as 'too ambitious,' the example of Phoenix Children's, along with a long list of Eclipsys clients that have achieved similar outcomes, demonstrates that meaningful CPOE adoption is very achievable and reasonable. We believe it is critical that a specific timetable must be set to put clinical decision support tools in practitioners' hands at the point of care in order to transform and improve the quality, safety and costs of our nation's healthcare system. We continue to push for a rate of CPOE adoption within the ARRA 'meaningful use' definition well above the currently proposed easy goal rate of 10 percent that would result in 90 percent of an institution's care being uncoordinated until higher rates are achieved. Our industry leading CPOE adoption rates and our clients' 100 percent achievement in exceeding regional and national quality core measure averages continue to be key differentiators for Eclipsys in the market."

KLAS is a research firm specializing in monitoring and reporting the performance of healthcare vendors.

Phoenix Children's Hospital is Arizona's only licensed children's hospital, providing care in more than 40 pediatric specialties to the state's sickest kids.

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