The US healthcare system faces enormous cost and quality challenges. Insurance premiums have been rising over 10% per year.
Patients, healthcare providers, and payers worry about errors, including more than 3 million annual avoidable mistakes in prescribing medications for outpatients that lead to adverse and sometimes life-threatening reactions.
Computerized provider order-entry (CPOE) systems, which doctors use to enter drug orders, can check for dangerous drug interactions and a patient sensitivities. Such systems have been shown reduce errors by more than 50% in hospitals.
However, outpatient healthcare providers have been slow to adopt such systems, because their effectiveness and cost savings have not been clear.