Health Partners New England Selects Medsphere’s Comprehensive Health IT Platform and Services

Headquartered in the Boston area, HPNE enables hospitals to improve the quality and financial performance of psychiatric and substance abuse services for children, adults and the elderly. The new 108-licensed bed TaraVista Behavioral Health Center™ is the first facility the company has built from the ground up. TaraVista will use OpenVista’s flexibility and comprehensive clinical, population health, financial and revenue cycle applications as core components in a unique care model providing short-term inpatient care for psychiatric and co-occurring substance abuse issues.

“We believe EHRs enable just as much improvement in behavioral health as they do in acute medical care,” said HPNE founder and CEO Michael P. Krupa, Ed.D. “Our structured RFP process identified the OpenVista enterprise solution as the best combination of predictable costs, value and functionality. The roots of OpenVista in VA VistA made Medsphere the clear choice for our needs, as did the enhanced quality and error reduction OpenVista has enabled at Silver Hill Hospital in Connecticut and other facilities.”

To maximize the effectiveness of OpenVista, Phoenix Health Systems will coordinate HPNE and Medsphere resources, create a comprehensive implementation plan, monitor performance and provide HPNE/TaraVista with regular project updates. With regard to the EHR, Phoenix will provide troubleshooting, as well as remote service desk and application software support, saving TaraVista the cost of expensive on-site support personnel.

“Health Partners New England is well known in behavioral health for the quality care they enable and the genuinely collaborative approach they embrace,” said Irv Lichtenwald, Medsphere president and CEO, “We’re honored that Dr. Krupa and his team see Medsphere as a genuine partner on the IT side and recognize the ways in which we work to accommodate client needs. This is a relationship of like philosophies as much as anything else, which bodes well for a long and productive future.”

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.

About Health Partners New England

Incorporated in 1998 and located in Winchester, Mass., Health Partners New England is dedicated to providing compassionate, effective, sustainable care for those suffering from mental illness or co-occurring substance use.

Health Partners New England’s distinctive approach to management, interim leadership and consultation has produced a substantial record of delivering key financial and clinical metrics through collaborative leadership with administrators, physicians and direct care staff.

About Medsphere and OpenVista

Founded in 2002 and based in Carlsbad, Calif., Medsphere Systems Corporation is an award-winning organization of clinical and technology professionals working to make quality health IT solutions accessible to organizations of virtually any size, shape or budget. Medsphere’s OpenVista is a portfolio of clinical products and services that leverages an electronic health record (EHR) system developed by the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Indian Health Service. This VistA EHR is widely credited with helping transform the VA into the nation’s most efficient and clinically effective healthcare organization. OpenVista, the most fully commercialized VistA offspring, is a responsible reapplication of the VA’s $8.5 billion investment, which recent studies show have yielded billions in benefits, primarily from the near elimination of medication administration issues and duplicate testing.

Medsphere’s subscription pricing model enables hospital systems and integrated delivery network customers to pay for OpenVista from their operating budget with no upfront costs or back-end balloon payments. Expert implementation and other services facilitate rapid transition to a paperless clinical environment based on best practices and evidence-based medicine in 9 to 12 months. Medsphere is a founding member of the Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA) and actively nurtures the VistA ecosystem, a global community of customers, partners, and other collaborators who drive health IT innovation to the benefit of all.

Learn more about Medsphere at www.medsphere.com.