Evaluating Order Sets: Ask The Best Questions, Improve Quality Of Care

While adopting evidence-based order sets is a known driver for improving quality measures, informatics teams often have a difficult time with order set maintenance and processes. Fortunately, asking the right questions about your order set practices can lead to improvements in patient outcomes.

Order sets bring together established clinical protocols, proven best practices, and medical content to guide the care process. By streamlining the delivery of standardized care, they can improve patient safety, outcomes, clinician performance, and regulatory compliance.

Achieving these outcomes requires a sufficient library of standardized order sets. Many organizations strive to have 200 to 300 order sets integrated into CPOE, though often there are more. The sheer volume of order sets required makes it very difficult for most informatics teams to build and maintain a comprehensive library on their own.

Further, organizations face the challenge of keeping order sets current with new medical evidence and other practice‑changing clinical developments. Clinical content management systems now exist which automate evidence monitoring and enable easy updates to existing order sets, ensuring that current best practices are followed.

As healthcare provider organizations evaluate their existing order set processes and search for possible alternatives, they should be asking the right questions to make sure long-term goals and the needs of clinicians are met.

To help with the evaluation, Wolters Kluwer has identified more than 150 questions for healthcare organizations to ponder, segmented across content, technology, and service. Presented as a Request for Proposal (RFP) Template, this tool will aid in auditing existing order set practices, as well as assessing alternative solutions.

Click here for more information on the RFP Template.