Leapfrog Group Said to Be Losing Its Way

Mr. HIStalk has reprinted an article written by him that was previously published in Inside Healthcare Computing about the precarious state of the Leapfrog Group (see: Leapfrog's Big Leap Into Irrelevance). Below is an excerpt from it that specifically focuses on computerized physician order entry (CPOE) with boldface emphasis mine:

CPOE prevents few patient errors. It prevents mistakes, but mostly those that would have been caught anyway by skilled professionals, such as transcription errors and clinically questionable orders. Just about every study done by AHRQ and others have said exactly that: there’s nothing wrong with CPOE, but just don’t expect it to make much of a difference in patient outcomes, particularly considering its immense cost and failure rate. Leapfrog should have been smart enough to steer clear of the CPOE bandwagon. Maybe they didn’t look around at the available products, small in number and large in functional deficiencies. Maybe their healthcare IT members twisted their arms to sell a few CPOE systems by mandate. At any rate, Leapfrog’s urgings probably sold a lot of CPOE systems, but their own survey shows they aren’t being used. Millions spent with little to show for it, apparently.

With regard to Leapfrog Group member attrition and as further evidence that the organization is losing its bite, he makes the following statement:

... I just compared their Members webpage with an archived version from 2004. Today’s count: 44 members. 2004’s count: 152 members. Among the missing: Allscripts, Cerner, Eclipsys, McKesson, Misys, Siemens. I hope no one got hurt in the mass exodus.

Copied from the Leapfrog home page, here are the admirable major goals of the organization for readers who may not recall why it was organized:

• Reduce preventable medical mistakes and improve the quality and affordability of health care.
• Encourage health providers to publicly report their quality and outcomes so that consumers and purchasing organizations can make informed health care choices.
• Reward doctors and hospitals for improving the quality, safety and affordability of health care.
• Help consumers reap the benefits of making smart health care decisions.

Let's try to work through all of these ideas in order to better understand why the Leapfrog Group may be faltering: (1) the adoption of CPOE at great expense by hospitals is now understood to have not been useful in avoiding medical errors;  (2) Leapfrog was not smart enough to steer clear of what Mr. HIStalk aptly refers to as a bandwagon; (3) some of the Leapfrog members were vendors of CPOE products and some of these very same companies are now disassociating themselves from the organization; (4) it seems likely to me that the Leapfrog agenda may have been unduly influenced by the business goals of some of its members and that there were inherent conflicts of interest in this organization from the outset.