Sacred Oak Medical Center, a new Houston-based inpatient behavioral health hospital has selected the Medsphere’s OpenVista® EHR system for implementation. The brand new behavioral health hospital will open later this summer with 20 beds and expand over time to an 80-bed capacity.
Sacred Oak is managed by RedShift Healthcare Management and Consulting, a Houston firm providing services focused on hospital management, mergers and acquisitions and rural healthcare networks.
Medsphere’s OpenVista is the commercialized version of VistA-based EHRs created and developed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and Indian Health Service (IHS) and credited with helping turn the agencies into national leaders in quality patient care. Using public sector code available from these agencies through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), OpenVista can be implemented much more quickly and affordably than traditional proprietary solutions.
“The benefits of EHR implementation apply to behavioral health care and addiction treatment, just as they do in acute medical care,” said RedShift Managing Partner Starsky Bomer. “The origins of OpenVista in VA VistA made Medsphere the clear choice for our needs, as did the improvements OpenVista has enabled at IntraCare North, another Houston-area behavioral health hospital, as well as Silver Hill Hospital in Connecticut and other facilities. It would be great to get federal Meaningful Use financial support for an EHR purchase, but the affordability of OpenVista makes it much less of an issue.”
