Leonard Williams Medical Center Case Summary

The following case study is about planning an EHR implementation. The Leonard Williams medical center (LWMC) is a community acute care hospital in New York state. LWMC offers several services and has a captive professional corporation. The medical center has five other hospitals. LWMC has an effective IT system, it was the first hospital to have a clinical information system and received several industry recognitions from its efforts. The management problem in this case is that the LWMC information system steering committees recently approved the implementation of a CPOE system. During the steering committee meeting that physician were worried to obtain the electronic health record because two years ago a group of physicians had purchased an EHR system, they encountered serious difficulties with the implementation of the EHR system, and has uninstalled the system, which cause the hospital to slow down their efforts (Wager, 2013).
There are many benefits of CPOE such as reducing medical errors related to medication orders and also help improve healthcare outcomes for the patients. Another benefit of the CPOE system is that it's alert physician patient's drug allergies and current medications which help them provide the effective help they need for that patient. A study found that “processing a prescription medication order through CPOE lowered the chance of an error occurring on that order by 48%. The authors of the study projected, based on the degree of CPOE implementation when the study was conducted, that 17.4 million medical errors could be avoided in the U.S. in one year” (What is computerized physician order entry CPOE,