One of the nation's leading healthcare networks in the use of mHealth technology has launched a project to develop a speech-enabled computerized physician order entry (CPOE) platform for mobile devices.
Intermountain Healthcare announced a partnership last week with M*Modal, a Franklin, Tenn.-based developer of clinical documentation and so-called 'Speech Understanding" solutions. Officials say the CPOE solution would enable clinicians to order patient medication and perform other functions simply by speaking into their iOS devices, including iPhone and iPad mobile digital devices.
“The ability for a physician to dictate common prescription orders and have them seamlessly integrated into our electronic medical record system can create better productivity and improve patient safety,” said Marc Probst, CIO and vice president of information systems at Intermountain Healthcare, a Salt Lake City-based network of 22 non-profit hospitals, 185 clinics and other resources, in a Feb. 22 press release.
“M*Modal and Intermountain are developing the industry’s first mobile order entry app to integrate speech understanding, giving physicians flexibility to make routine orders anytime and anywhere,” added Vern Davenport, CEO for M*Modal, in the release. “Our solution will integrate easily into a healthcare provider’s workflow, while capturing orders completely and accurately so physicians can focus on more critical needs at the point of care.”
The project comes at a time when CPOE is making news for its potential to cut the nation's reported medication errors in half. According to a study supported by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, processing drugs via CPOE can decrease the likelihood of an erroneous drug order by 48 percent, resulting in some 17.4 million avoided medication errors in one year.
According to officials, M*Modal's CPOE app will support common, frequently prescribed medications and will be designed to perform other functions, such as CT scans and other imaging functions, nursing functions and testing (lab tests, CBC, blood glucose, etc.). For medication orders, officials said, the clinician would be able to select the patient, describe the prescription (dosage, frequency and qualifiers) and other information, then send the request to an EHR-based order entry system.
M*Modal officials say they expect to launch the app in the fall of 2013 and will partner with other health systems to integrate it with their IT platforms.
