Blue Mountain Hospital to Achieve Meaningful Use Through Implementation of Medsphere's OpenVista EHR System
-Proven Open Source Solution Goes Live in Months, Not Years, to Rapidly Improve Patient Care at New Regional Acute Care Facility
Medsphere Systems Corporation, the leading provider of open source healthcare IT solutions, today announced the successful implementation of OpenVista, the company's flagship electronic health record (EHR) at the 11-bed Blue Mountain Hospital in Blanding, Utah. Proven to enable meaningful use of health IT by positively impacting patient mortality rates and improving overall clinical outcomes, OpenVista's deployment at Blue Mountain Hospital is a model for how vitally important rural hospitals can improve care by quickly deploying a comprehensive EHR system.
"Blue Mountain is a state-of-the-art facility on the forefront of the healthcare industry's move towards improving care by digitizing medical records," said Lorin MacKay, chief executive officer at Blue Mountain Hospital. "We recognized the value of an EHR system in improving patient care some time ago, and with Medsphere supporting and assisting us, Blue Mountain is proud to now offer the best of technology and medical care to our community."
OpenVista's flexible open source technology enables Medsphere to tailor the solution to the specific and evolving needs of Blue Mountain, which offers crucial medical services to residents of the Four Corners region encompassing sections of Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico.
"Traditionally, EMR implementations take years and require great financial and personnel resources. Medsphere is proud to work with Blue Mountain to demonstrate that health IT can be both affordable and available in months, not years," said Michael J. Doyle, president and CEO of Medsphere. "Every hospital needs to have an EHR. The deployment by Blue Mountain of OpenVista proves that any hospital in the country regardless of size can afford the most widely and successfully deployed EHR in the world."
The implementation of OpenVista at Blue Mountain will give clinicians access to computerized physician order entry (CPOE) and clinical documentation functionality, along with clinical IT support for laboratory, radiology, pharmacy and nutrition services. At Blue Mountain, Medsphere also installed Fidelity Information Service's (FIS) GT.M, the leading open source implementation of MUMPS, enabling significant cost savings and a fully open source technology stack. Medsphere's deployment of OpenVista on GT.M enables benefits for both customers and developers in the Healthcare Open Source Ecosystem.
"We are delighted that Medsphere chose GT.M for the OpenVista implementation at Blue Mountain," said K.S. Bhaskar, senior vice president for Fidelity Information Services. "It is a pleasure to collaborate with an organization that understands so well how open source software empowers the user. We look forward to continuing our partnership with Medsphere for a long time to come, and to helping bring state-of-the-art electronic medical records to the patients of Blue Mountain."
This year has been significant for EHRs and open source healthcare IT solutions nationally. Blue Mountain's OpenVista implementation follows West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller's (D-WV) call earlier this year for the use of proven open source EHRs to improve patient care in all U.S. hospitals. As hospitals nationwide evaluate federal assistance for the implementation of digital patient records through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), Blue Mountain is a model for demonstrating meaningful use through rapid implementation and efficient integration of technology and medical care.
Medsphere's OpenVista is the commercialized version of the VistA EHR created and developed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) over 20 years ago and credited with helping turn the agency into a national leader in quality patient care. Using open source code available from the VA through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), OpenVista can be implemented much more quickly and affordably than comparable vendor proprietary solutions.
