OSEHRA 2012: Oroville Hospital CEO Addresses Open Source EHR Meeting in Washington

Robert Wentz, President and CEO of Oroville Hospital, talked about the hospital's success in implementing the open source VistA EHR during the keynote panel at the 1st Annual Open Source EHR Summit.

PRLog (Press Release) - Nov 05, 2012 - Robert Wentz, President and CEO of Oroville Hospital, addressed a packed audience of more than 400 participants at the 1st Annual Open Source EHR Summit held October 17 & 18 at the Gaylord National Conference Center at National Harbor, MD, just outside Washington D.C. Wentz spoke during the keynote opening panel of the conference. 

The Summit was hosted by the Open Source Electronic Health Records Agent (OSEHRA) organization, the custodial agent of the open source software code for the U.S. Department of Veteran's Affairs' (VA) VistA EHR system. While more than 50 private and State hospitals in the United States have implemented VistA, Oroville Hospital is the first hospital in the country to self-implement the open source electronic health record (EHR) system. 

The hospital's extraordinary success has made Oroville Hospital's EHR implementation a “reference implementation” to be studied by all hospitals who are seeking to implement a fully capable, yet affordable EHR that they control. Oroville's success story was recently featured in an article in Forbes.

During his presentation at the OSEHRA conference, Wentz outlined the significant challenges that CEOs and CIOs in private sector hospitals are facing today in order to sustain EHR implementations, including the end of the financial incentives from the healthcare IT stimulus, and perverse incentives for vendors not to support true interoperability. As CEO, his solution was to investigate and invest in Open Source solutions. Wentz told the story of how a software vendor refused to help Oroville Hospital migrate their patient data out of their application, instead demanding substantial licensing fees to continue the use of their program. The situation was resolved by having one of Oroville's open source consultants write Triplestore, a program that extracted the data and migrated it into VistA.

According to Wentz, Oroville Hospital's leadership saw the challenges posed by proprietary EHRs years ago and that led to their decision to implement VistA. It started with the accidental discovery that VistA could be downloaded online. Oroville downloaded a copy from the web and had it running in a test system in a short time. Then the hospital found a CIO that was supportive of implementing VistA in the hospital. 

Wentz also debunked the myth that it is difficult to obtain support for open source products. Instead, Wentz says, VistA solution providers made themselves available to help Oroville in its implementation, including the VistA Expertise Network, the WorldVistA organization and several independent consultants including George Lilly, Rob Tweed, Mark Amundson, and Stuart Frank.

Wentz underlined the importance of OSEHRA for the VistA community. According to Wentz, having an organization like OSEHRA, working together with the VA, is going to level the playing field in a largely proprietary EHR market by just being in it. And speaking as a representative of hospitals across the US, Wentz said he is looking forward to OSEHRA continuing to activate and support an open source community to support and improve VistA.

About Oroville Hospital

Founded in 1962, Oroville Hospital has grown from a modest community hospital supported by a small staff of dedicated doctors into a 153-bed acute care facility specializing in a broad range of inpatient and outpatient services, including multiple physician practices. Oroville Hospital is a private, non-profit corporation serving the citizens of the Oroville area and Butte County by OroHealth Corporation. With a medical staff of more than 130 physicians, Oroville Hospital prides itself on providing the highest quality medical care in a friendly and compassionate environment.

For more information, please contact:

Shanna Roelofson
Director of Marketing
Oroville Hospital
sroelofson(at)orohosp(dot)com

(530) 532-8044
http://www.OrovilleHospital.com