It’s still rare these days to see a private hospital roll out open source EMR VistA, despite VistA’s excellent reputation. But one such hospital has not only implemented VistA, it’s added CPOE to its VistA rollout.
The facility in question is Oroville (CA) Hospital, which spent three years self-implementing the VA platform. Oroville has spent seven years developing a paper-based order set system, and has now converted its order sets from paper to electronic.
For a year the medical staff at Oroville had been using paper order sets and the VistA EMR, but that arrangement was getting old, so the transition was a happy one, according to Dr. Matthew Fine, the hospital’s chief medical officer, who’s quoted in a press statement.
“After a whole year of using paper and electronic charts the staff was chomping at the bit to go live and the anticipation outweighed the fear… so turning on CPOE was almost a welcomed event. The inadvertent strategy of having hybrid charts seems to have been a good way to make full conversion to EHR/CPOE more palatable,” Dr. Fine said.
To make the CPOE transition, the Oroville staff created a mechanism for systematically converting order sets to an electronic format, the press release notes. Each order set, once transformed, was reviewed by a relevant group of physicians along with 20-odd additional staff including department/section heads, nurses, pharmacists, nutritionists, lab staff and anyone else who might be carrying out the orders in the order sets.
Since go-live in October of last year, electronic order volume has mounted, and now 80 percent of orders are electronic. The hospital’s goal is for 100 percent of orders to be electronic, but it has hit a stumbling block in that it has been unable to adapt VistA’s original CP Flowsheet module.
For that reason, Oroville will have to create its own CPOE solution for several areas of the hospital, including outpatient surgery and the PACU.
