A Rural Health System’s Leapfrog Improvement Using Smarter Medication Guidance

After becoming newly independent, our healthcare system faced a critical challenge: how to maintain our community’s trust in the quality and safety of our care without the infrastructure of a large healthcare system. With limited resources, we set a goal to improve our Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade. One of our first challenges was Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE). We leveraged analytics and medication decision support innovation to achieve a CPOE rate of more than 95 percent and surpass the average Leapfrog CPOE testing score of 80.23. This session tells the story of how the healthcare system leveraged a data and clinical decision support optimization solution to analyze, optimize and streamline medication alerts across its electronic health record without creating alert fatigue. The result was a dramatic improvement in alert relevance and a notable decrease in prescriber overrides, coupled with high levels of clinician satisfaction and improved Leapfrog CPOE testing results. Attendees will learn replicable strategies for enhancing clinical safety and efficiency, even in settings where staffing and budgets are constrained.