Once again, a paper - this time published in Pediatrics - has raised controversy about CPOE. These researchers studied the impact of a CPOE implementation over 18 months at Children's Hospital of Pittsburg. You can read the full text yourself for a mere $12 here. Or you can avail yourself of the excellent summary and analysis from Mr HIStalk here. Be sure to read the comments too.

I'm glad they did the study, but it seems to me more of a "don't do what we did" lesson for hospitals, not an indictment of [Cerner's] Millennium. I think their purpose was to raise the awareness of broad outcomes in a major system change and the article does a good job of that.

[...] The only serious takeaway I got from the article was this: be careful out there, vendors and customers alike. No one wants to kill anyone with software or software implementation, especially children. Changing processes is hard work. Magazines, consultants, and vendors make it all seem easy. It's not.

Once again, a lesson in the importance of how you use your tools over the relative quality of the tool.