Oroville, CA, -- Right on the heels of their successful inpatient certification, Oroville Hospital and WorldVistA has done it again. Through cooperative efforts these two entities have rendered the Ambulatory Care Meaningful Use Certification of WorldVistA’s EHR, Electronic Health Records. This puts Oroville Hospital right on track in proving Meaningful Use this year.
WorldVistA’s previous Ambulatory Care version 1.0 was certified in 2008, but did not meet the certification requirements of the new Meaningful Use directives. Version 2.0 was made possible through the collaboration of WorldVistA and Oroville Hospital’s contributions and dedicated EHR Team. The Ambulatory Care MU featuring the Oroville Hospital ePrescribe open source product will be packaged and available to other hospitals ambulatory care settings in October.
Certification could have not been possible without Oroville Hospital’s ePrescribe product, oRo eRx 1.0, initiated by Dr. Narinder Singh, Chief Medical Information Officer at Oroville Hospital. Oroville Hospital had previously started and developed ePrescribe to improve the functionality and patient safety measures to enhance visibility within their EHR system, VistA. Funded by Oroville Hospital, oRo eRx 1.0 has been in production at Oroville for over 6 months, providing thousands of ePrescribing transactions for a dozen of prescribers who are affiliated with the hospital and supported by Oroville’s VistA system.
The ePrecribe solution, oRo eRx 1.0, implements a browser and web service based interface to an ePrescibing service provider, NewCrop, which provides delivery of medication orders to pharmacies and renewal requests from pharmacies via SureScripts, drug-to-drug and drug-to-allergy order checks, payer formulary checks, other provider order checks via RxHub, and full management of patient medication lists. The oRo eRx 1.0 package uses web services to retrieve medication lists and orders from NewCrop and integrates them into VistA as VistA Drugs using the RxNorm tables from the UMLS, Unified Medical Language System, which is obtained from the National Library of Medicine (NLM).
“To my knowledge, oRo eRx is the first of its kind in the level of integration it implements between an external ePrescribing service and VistA. The use of web services and the RxNorm database for drug mapping gives us a solid foundation for the future of ePrescribing,” says George Lilly, Vice President of WorldVistA and the lead developer and programmer behind oRo eRx 1.0.
“All in all, we were able to achieve both Hospital and Ambulatory Certification through the efforts of dedicated volunteers in the open source community with major parts of the project funded by both WorldVistA and Oroville Hospital. Without this ‘Village Effort’ it would not have been possible.” says Matthew King MD, the Chief Clinical Content Developer for WorldVistA’s certification project.