Order sets

Order set:  Synonym:  Social Justice, socialism.  Every patient with a given diagnosis (DRG) is treated the same.  Once a patient is admitted with a certain DRG, these sets pre-determine what you order for that patient.  The purpose of these is to make sure best medicine practice is followed for every patient.  Basically, a committee determines what is best for the patient, and this assumes that the caregivers at the bedside are not capable of critical thinking.  Another advantage of order sets, and the reason they are being initiated in most hospitals, is to make sure intensity of service is met.  This assures that the patient will meet reimbursement criteria.  In the past physicians were presented with a sheet that listed all the options.  Today, however, many of these options are pre-checked and automatically ordered whether the doctor wants to or not.  The reason for this is to make sure reimbursement criteria is met (see below).

Cook book medicine:  Treating all patients the same.  This is generally the theme created to describe order sets, especially order sets that have pre-checked boxes that result in procedures being automatically ordered for a particular DRG.

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