Oroville Hospital's CMO Discusses VistA Implementation and CPOE - Part 1

Several years ago I had the pleasure of meeting Dr Matthew Fine, Chief Medical Officer and Director of Patient Safety at Oroville Hospital, at UCSF’s annual CME course Management of the Hospitalized Patient.  When Dr Fine attended the course again this year, he told me Oroville Hospital had recently gone live with CPOE on VistA, the EHR developed by the Veterans’ Administration. I’ve invited Dr Fine to post a two-part series here on Oroville Hospital’s experience. In this first part, he discusses their strategic approach and their initial experiences with electronic documentation, and in the second, their CPOE go-live. — RC

On October 16, 2012, Oroville Hospital turned on the CPOE component of its EHR, becoming the first individual US hospital to successfully adapt the Veterans’ Administration’s highly regarded electronic medical records system. How did a small, 153 bed semirural California hospital serving a mostly Medicare and MediCal population arrive at this place?

Almost exactly six years before, in October 2006, I attended the EMR and CPOE workshop with Drs. Russ Cucina and Michael Blum at the UCSF Hospital Medicine conference chaired by Dr. Bob Wachter.  The last thing Dr Cucina mentioned was the VistA system, which he said had barriers to its use at a non-VA hospital. At Oroville Hospital we had been discussing what do about EHR. We found that the proprietary systems were expensive, less than functionally ideal, and we didn’t want the tail wagging the dog. At one of our meetings in early 2007 I remembered I’d heard about the VA system and that “it’s free.” That night our CEO, Bob Wentz, downloaded the program...