DERIDDER, LA – Beauregard Memorial Hospital, a 60-bed, acute care and community hospital has selected open-source technology to automate its medical records.
Beauregard will implement Medsphere's OpenVista electronic health record system. As a rural, acute and primary care facility, Beauregard is on track to fully and meaningfully deploy OpenVista by June 2010 and become eligible for financial incentives as outlined by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, according to its executives.
"Beauregard Memorial Hospital proves that any hospital in the U.S. can rapidly implement, and meaningfully use, an enterprise EHR," said Ted Badger, CEO at Beauregard. "As one of many small, rural hospitals in the U.S., we are excited to demonstrate how a hospital of our size can afford to fully implement an electronic health record system."
The flexibility offered by open source technology enables Carlsbed, Calif.-based Medsphere to provide a portfolio of clinical transformation services by tailoring OpenVista to the specific needs of Beauregard, say Medsphere officials.
"Medsphere is very pleased to be working with Beauregard and early adopters like Ted Badger who have the perspective to understand what OpenVista represents and what Medsphere is trying to do," said Michael J. Doyle, president and CEO of Medsphere. In Doyle's view OpenVista and Medsphere's associated support services comprise the most efficient path to meaningful use and federal stimulus funding.
In addition to Beauregard, West Virginia's state hospitals, Blue Mountain Hospital in Utah, Midland Memorial Hospital in Texas, Wyoming's Memorial Hospital of Sweetwater County, Silver Hill Hospital in Connecticut and Lutheran Medical Center in New York all share best practices and source code enhancements to OpenVista code at Medsphere.org, the Web portal for the ecosystem where Medsphere partners communicate and collaborate.
Open source healthcare IT solutions have gained momentum nationally in 2009, starting with West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller's (D-WV) recent call for the public funding and use of proven open source EHRs to improve patient care. The Rockefeller bill, called the Health Information Technology Public Utility Act of 2009, would require the federal government to develop standards for an interoperable health IT system and create an open source electronic health records solution available to all healthcare providers at little or no cost.
OpenVista is the commercialized version of the VistA EHR created and developed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs over 20 years ago and credited with helping turn the agency into a national leader in quality patient care.
