Summary
Objectives: To identify and describe the most critical strategic and operational contributors
to the successful implementation of clinical information technologies, as deployed
within a moderate sized system of U.S. community hospitals.
Background and Setting: CHRISTUS Health is a multi-state system comprised of more than 350 services and 60
hospitals with over 9 000 physicians. The Santa Rosa region of CHRISTUS Health, located
in greater San Antonio, Texas is comprised of three adult community hospital facilities
and one Children’s hospital each with bed capacities of 142–180. Computerized Patient
Order Entry (CPOE) was first implemented in 2012 within a complex market environment.
The Santa Rosa region has 2 417 credentialed physicians and 263 mid-level allied health
professionals.
Methods: This report focuses on the seven most valuable strategies deployed by the Health
Informatics team in a large four hospital CHRISTUS region to achieve strong CPOE adoption
and critical success lessons learned. The findings are placed within the context of
the literature describing best practices in health information technology implementation.
Results: While the elements described involved discrete de novo process generation to support
implementation and operations, collectively they represent the creation of a new customer-centric
service culture in our Health Informatics team, which has served as a foundation for
ensuring strong clinical information technology adoption beyond CPOE.
Conclusion: The seven success factors described are not limited in their value to and impact
on CPOE adoption, but generalize to – and can advance success in – varied other clinical
information technology implementations across diverse hospitals. A number of these
factors are supported by reports in the literature of other institutions’ successful
implementations of CPOE and other clinical information technologies, and while not
prescriptive to other settings, may be adapted to yield value elsewhere.
Keywords
CPOE/health informatics implementation - CPOE adoption - clinical information technology
implementation - health information technology implementation
