-Two weeks after implementation, physician CPOE adoption hits 93% for inpatient medication orders

BROOKLYN, N.Y., and SAN DIEGO—Lutheran Medical Center (LMC) and Medsphere Systems Corporation today announced the successful implementation of Medsphere’s OpenVista® electronic health record (EHR) solution throughout the hospital. The full service 476-bed teaching hospital is now on track to achieve meaningful use and qualify for millions of dollars made available by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Since implementing OpenVista only a few weeks ago, LMC has embraced the comprehensive open source health IT system throughout the facility. 

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Accenture and ACT-IAC particularly praised the administration's support for open standards in building health IT software. For example, the Veterans Affairs Department is considering upgrading digital patient records with open source software -- programs that use nonproprietary coding -- that would let outside developers improve and modify the code. VA's current e-records system, Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA), is based on a 1996 model for information exchange. Read More »

MedVirginia, a Richmond, Va.-based health information exchange, is now linked to the virtual lifetime electronic record, a collaboration between the healthcare systems of the Defense and Veterans Affairs departments and civilian healthcare systems, the organization has announced.

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-The DoH's apparent enthusiasm for openness has not been reflected in its consultation paper on information

The positive stance of the Cabinet Office towards Open Source software is widely communicated. However the Department of Health's current IT consultation paper 'An Information Revolution' does not mention open source software at all. This stark omission in a paper which depends on 'a presumption of openness' across the NHS supply chain begs for comment from the open source community. 

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"I know that Google has moved forward with FISMA certification of some of the stuff they are doing so that is a possibility," [Roger Baker, VA CIO] said. "The issue there is that there are various levels of certification and what they have achieved is medium and for the types of information we store, it would have to be a high certification. But we look at is there a way to embrace the tool as it stands? Is there a way to bring the tool inside the VA firewall and control access to it a bit more and meet our requirements that way?"