Medsphere(R) Systems Corporation, the leading provider of Open Source healthcare IT solutions, today announced the transition of corporate headquarters from Orange County to north San Diego County. The move is necessitated by two primary factors: recent development and persistent demand for Medsphere OpenVista(R), the company's cost-effective Open Source electronic health record (EHR) solution and rapid expansion of a collaborative Open Source community -- the Healthcare Open Source Ecosystem -- oriented around OpenVista and focused on enhancing quality of care and increasing clinical and operational efficiencies. Medsphere's new corporate headquarters are located at 1917 Palomar Oaks Way, Carlsbad, California 92008.

Medsphere's move to Carlsbad enables the 87-employee company to expand its available physical space by 50 percent and take advantage of the county's more affordable real estate. The move will also allow Medsphere to expand and recruit more employees from the area's substantial IT talent pool. Medsphere joins several prominent healthcare and technology organizations also headquartered in San Diego County, including Sharp HealthCare, Scripps Health, Qualcomm Inc. and AT&T.

From the same time period last year, Medsphere has expanded personnel by 33 percent to accommodate increased sales activity, a demanding development pace and support for an additional six facilities now live on OpenVista. This growing market has been studied by business analysts at Health Industry Insights, an IDC company, who forecasted the total EHR provider market in the United States to grow by more than 10 percent in 2008 (Source: Health Industry Insights). Medsphere's own research indicates that this market is growing by 15 percent annually and that more than 85 percent remains untapped. In addition to recent implementations, Medsphere's momentum has been spurred by strategic partnerships that are helping the company solidify its position as a leader in Open Source healthcare IT.

"Medsphere is experiencing widespread customer adoption, forming powerful partnerships that expand the capabilities of our technology and hitting our stride in terms of growth," said CEO Michael J. Doyle. "We want to do everything possible to maintain this momentum. The move to San Diego County enables Medsphere to recruit from a qualified pool of talent and puts us in proximity to potential partners from healthcare and IT that are also putting down roots in the region. As our 2008 success clearly demonstrates, hospitals are recognizing the value of Open Source in healthcare. We look forward to many years of success in our new location."

Ongoing Company Momentum

Earlier this month, Medsphere announced a strategic partnership for comprehensive support of OpenVista with Irvine-based WebReach, Inc., a premier healthcare IT consultancy and creator of Open Source health IT solutions. The partnership enables Medsphere and WebReach to offer hospitals an Open Source, feature-rich and commercially supported solution that meets unique facility needs and overcomes the cost, interoperability and complexity limitations of traditional vendor-lock EHRs.

In May, Medsphere announced the Open Source release of OpenVista Clinical Information System (CIS) version 1.0 Beta and OpenVista Server version 1.5.86. The Open Source releases coincided with the beta implementation of the OpenVista CIS Enterprise edition at Century City Doctors Hospital (CCDH) in Los Angeles and effectively aligned the Open Source and commercial versions of OpenVista. Simultaneously, Medsphere announced the transition of both applications from the GNU General Public License (GPL) for OpenVista Server and the Medsphere Public License (MSPL) for CIS to version 3 of the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL).

Medsphere also completed several successful implementations of OpenVista in the last year at facilities operated by the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources (WV DHHR), CCDH in Los Angeles, and Memorial Hospital of Sweetwater County in Rock Springs, Wyoming. Medsphere's current activities include OpenVista implementations at Lutheran Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York.

In March, Medsphere announced that Midland Memorial Hospital (MMH) in West Texas, one of the company's premier customers, joined an elite group of 13 hospitals as a Health Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS) Analytics Stage 6 facility, a designation recognizing established levels of automated patient care and clinical process improvement. With OpenVista, MMH was able to achieve Stage 6 for about one third of the cost of other commercial systems in roughly half the implementation time traditionally required. The announcement further validated the benefits of OpenVista over alternative EHR solutions.

About OpenVista

OpenVista is a commercialized version of the highly acclaimed VistA EHR created and developed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs over more than 20 years. OpenVista enables hospitals and other healthcare facilities to reduce operating costs and improve patient care more rapidly and inexpensively than other approaches. As a disruptive technology, OpenVista meets the needs of acute, ambulatory, and long-term care environments, as well as multi-facility, multi-specialty healthcare organizations, and offers clinicians a feature-rich, user-friendly and secure environment for accessing all critical patient information in real time.

Medsphere supports the core principles of the Open Source community and has released the enhanced code base for the OpenVista Clinical Information System (CIS), the EHR's core medical record application. The Open Source release of CIS enables customers and other interested parties to use, modify, and enhance it in support of improved processes and workflows, and better patient safety. OpenVista is the core focus of the Healthcare Open Source Ecosystem, a collaborative community of healthcare facilities, developers, value-added resellers, clinicians and other interested parties dedicated to improving patient care through Open Source tools. The Ecosystem enables participants to develop OpenVista according to particular needs and desires, communicate feedback, share enhancements, and benefit from one another's work.

About Medsphere Systems Corporation

As the Open Source source for healthcare, Medsphere is revolutionizing the industry by delivering commercially supported software based on the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs' proven VistA EHR. Medsphere offers healthcare an economically sustainable and comprehensive solution in OpenVista(R), a portfolio of products and professional services for hospitals, clinics, and integrated delivery networks. The company addresses the capital constraints of the healthcare industry through an innovative subscription-based pricing model. Medsphere's experienced team of healthcare technology professionals and unique suite of implementation tools deliver a fluid transition to a comprehensive healthcare information technology solution. Founded in 2002, Medsphere is backed financially by Azure Capital Partners, Thomas Weisel Venture Partners, and EPIC Ventures (formerly the Wasatch Venture Fund). For more information, visit http://www.medsphere.com.

Contacts

Medsphere Systems
Rick Jung
Chief Operating Officer
(949) 297-8182 office
rick.jung@medsphere.com

Media
Marisa Borgasano
Schwartz Communications for Medsphere
(415) 512-0770
medsphere@schwartz-pr.com

SOURCE: Medsphere

mailto:rick.jung@medsphere.com
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