Is computerized physician order entry use associated with a decrease in hospital resource utilization in hospitals that care for children?

Despite large hospital costs for implementation and maintenance of Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) for medication safety, little evidence exists to determine if predicted efficiency improvements translate into lower hospital resource utilization for inpatient pediatrics. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between hospital CPOE use and resource utilization per case within children's healthcare. The authors use a retrospective cross-sectional design with linear regression to assess relationships between hospital CPOE use and resource utilization per case. Despite large CPOE costs and financial barriers to adoption, we find that compared to those without CPOE, hospitals with CPOE did not have significantly lower cost per case. Because of the lack of evidence for financial benefit for CPOE use hospitals will likely need other motives to adopt CPOE. This emphasizes the importance of financial incentives for adoption of CPOE within children's healthcare and represents important benchmark data for future comparison.