3M drops CPOE to focus on core EMR functions - Electronic Medical Records - Brief Article

Health Management Technology, Nov, 2002

While the focus on computerized physician order entry and workflow intensifies, 3M Health Information Systems has announced a new business strategy that drops CPOE and clinical documentation applications from its 3M Care Innovation software and instead zeroes in on development and marketing of what it sees as critical to the success of all computer patient record systems: clinical data repository, medical language, enterprise master patient index, and alert management functions.

"Healthcare organizations that have achieved success [with CPR systems] have first implemented the core infrastructure of the CPR and then developed the front-end applications around it," says James Burgess, vice president and general manager of 3M Health Information Systems. "These organizations recognize that front-end applications like physician order entry can't provide value unless they are built on a solid foundation of coded and normalized data."

The strategy will move 3M away from direct competition with Cerner, Eclipsys and other healthcare IT vendors of physician workflow suites. Instead, 3M sees other vendors as possible OEM customers for its medical vocabulary and CPR architecture products.