•New high-order numerical approach for heat and Poisson equations.•Increase in accuracy by four orders for heat equation in 2-D case.•Increase in accuracy by twelve orders for Poisson equation in 2-D case.•A stencil equation with optimal order of accuracy. A new approach for the increase in the order of accuracy of high order elements used for the time dependent heat equation and for the time independent Poisson equation has been suggested on uniform square and rectangular meshes. It is based on the optimization of the coefficients of the corresponding discrete stencil equation with respect to the local truncation error. By a simple modification of the coefficients of 25-point stencils, the new approach exceeds the accuracy of the quadratic isogeometric elements by four orders for the heat equation and by twelve orders for the Poisson equation. Despite the significant increase in accuracy, the computational costs of the new technique are the same as those for the conventional quadratic isogeometric elements on a given mesh. The numerical examples are in a good agreement with the theoretical results for the new approach and also show that the new approach is much more accurate than the conventional isogeometric elements at the same number of degrees of freedom. Hybrid methods that combine the new stencils with the conventional isogeometric and finite elements and can be applied to irregular domains are also presented.