Oroville Hospital's CMO Discusses VistA Implementation and CPOE - Part 2

Matthew N. Fine | Russ Cucina MD, MS | December 10, 2012

This is the second in Dr Fine’s two-part series describing Oroville Hospital‘s implementation of VistA, the open-source EHR developed by the Veterans’ Administration. In his first post, he discussed their strategic approach and initial experiences with electronic documentation. Here, he picks up with Oroville Hospital’s CPOE go-live. – RC

After a whole year of hybrid charts the staff was chomping at the bit to go live and the anticipation outweighed the fear. Turning on CPOE was almost a welcomed event – watch out what you wish for. I think the (unintentional) strategy of having hybrid charts may be a good way to make full conversion to EHR more palatable.  CPOE was turned on October 15, and by the end of the first week nearly 70% of the orders were electronic and it’s now about 80%. There are holdouts among some of the physicians, notably surgeons and OB/Gynes.  Does anyone else have this problem? The hospitalists have a co-management arrangement with the surgeons, so most of their patients’ orders are electronic.

This situation has actually give the EHR staff a little breather, enabling them to clean up many of the minor problems, including building a number of new orders sets – everything on VistA is easier with an order set.  We expect that CPOE will be mandatory within two months.  The pharmacy has created weight-based medication orders for pediatrics.  We don’t have a neonatal ICU, but it’s felt that the CP Flowsheet module could be adapted for this function. We are still working on a better medication reconciliation system...