Lutheran Medical Center
Open-source EHR 'Answer to Cash-strapped Industry's Prayers'
The third non-federal organization to adopt OpenVista, a VistA-derived EHR solution, Lutheran Medical Center is a full-service, 476-bed teaching hospital that has cared for Brooklyn's diverse communities since 1883. A Level One Trauma Center and Stroke Center, the hospital is also the hub of Lutheran HealthCare, a network of primary, acute and long-term care centers offering a continuum of services from early childhood development, to senior support, to state-of-the-art medical care.
Named the best-rated hospital in Brooklyn in 2006, Lutheran Medical Center was ranked among the top five percent in the nation for clinical outcomes by HealthGrades. It's Surgical Weight Loss Institute is the only bariatric surgery program in Brooklyn to be designated a Center of Excellence by the American Society for Bariatric Surgery while also holding Level I Accreditation from the American College of Surgeons.
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News
LMC's May Dinner Dance to honor Dr. Zaloom; raise $$s for EHR initiative
Mar. 18, 2010—Lutheran will host its 127th Anniversary "Casino Night" Dinner Dance May 8 at the Grand Hyatt New York. Proceeds from this year's event—which will highlight Dr. Robert A. Zaloom's contributions
to the health of LMC's community—will go towards the medical center's implementation of electronic health records and help further Lutheran’s mission of serving the needs of its
neighbors. Click here for the Lutheran news release and here for info on sponsorship.
One on one with LMC CIO Steve Art
Sept. 2009—According to LMC CIO Steve Art "the VA’s open-source VistA software (commercialized via Medsphere as OpenVista) is the answer to a cash-strapped industry’s prayers." Click here to read Healthcare Informatics Editor-in-Chief Anthony Guerra's four-part interview ("One-on-One with Lutheran Medical Center CIO Steve Art").
The straight-talking Brooklyn CIO talks about how his Medsphere EHR system "will be paid for with the stimulus money."
"Medsphere will charge you a quarterly fee, and the fee is based on how big you (are), the number of beds you have . . . And then they show you when the stimulus money kicks in and you get your money back, and the return for most hospitals is less than four years. That means that the stimulus money for most places, will be enough to reimburse for the system completely. And they’ll pay it out slowly to the vendor.
"When you see those graphs on your hospital and you say, ‘God, I’m going to get $6 million from the government, and it’s only going to cost me $3 million to put this thing in,’ you say to yourself, ‘What am I doing, why am I looking at $50 million (for a proprietary EHR system)? That is just eye opening to the CFO."
Art on the Healthcare Open Source Ecosystem (sponsored by Medsphere): ". . . as we get to be a bigger community, we will share (and we already are sharing) our templates between hospitals. We all share and then we give them to Medsphere and they post all of this stuff on their online site . . . I just think it’s neat that OpenVista figured out how to share stuff, and all the proprietary vendors won’t do that with their clients. If you want to buy forms from them, they’ll sell it to you."
Art on being an open-source customer: " . . . it’s the same relationship I had with my vendor as I had with all other vendors. They are doing all the other stuff that normally a vendor would do and I’m doing the stuff that I can do, and if I want to take on more, I can. The relationship is I can do more if I want to, I don’t have to. And for some of their small clients, the client does nothing, literally does nothing. I’m doing more because I’m able to do more and I want to do more because I want to see this thing go. That’s why I’m building the tracking board for ED and that kind of stuff. But there is no requirement that I do that. I don't see this is as being any more difficult than putting in . . . anybody else. This is no different."
Says Art about LMC's selection of Medsphere: "This is a no‑brainer. I was at (a meeting) . . . (in San Antonio) . . .; we asked the CFOs how many of them know how much stimulus money they’re in line for and they didn’t, and that just knocked me over. If you haven’t started thinking about an EMR system yet—I’m in the middle of implementing it, and I’ll get it up before 2011—but if you haven’t bought one yet, you are going to be hard‑pressed to have it up by 2011 . . . "
A Glass Slipper
Sept. 1, 2009—Click here to access "A Glass Slipper?" Mark Hagland's Healthcare Informatics article on open-source EHR technology detailing use of OpenVista by LMC, Midland Memorial Hospital and other Medsphere customer partners.
LMC Announces Selection of OpenVista
Click here to access the news release announcing LMC's selection of OpenVista: "Open Source-Based System Will Help Optimize Patient Care ..."
LMC Team Photos
