Hospital electronic health record developer Medsphere Systems and ambulatory EHR maker ChartLogic are merging.

The move, announced June 28, expands Medsphere’s enterprise healthcare IT products and services to include ChartLogic’s ambulatory EHR, practice management and medical billing technology.

Salt Lake City-based ChartLogic, will operate as a division of Medsphere, which is headquartered in Carlsbad, Calif. ChartLogic will retain both its name and location.

ChartLogic EHR incorporates voice navigation and speech recognition for charting. It also includes a library of specialty-oriented vocabularies, templates, macros and other customization tools.

“With this merger of Medsphere and ChartLogic, we’re creating a comprehensive healthcare IT platform that extends from physician practices to acute care hospitals and inpatient behavioral health facilities, ensuring continuity of care and patient information,” said Medsphere President and CEO Irv Lichtenwald in a press statement.

"And we’re doing it affordably," he added, "so clinics and hospitals can manage their IT and improve care without going deeply into debt, as is often the case with similarly comprehensive systems."

[See also: CEO Spotlight: EHR vendor Medsphere will continue to build on its open source heritage.]

"ChartLogic has always been about improving the efficiency and quality of care in physician practices, so we’re very excited to join Medsphere and expand that objective to all of healthcare," said ChartLogic CEO Zubin Emsley, in a statement.

"The simple fact is that the comprehensive solution platforms available to hospitals and integrated delivery networks today are contributing to the high cost of healthcare, not alleviating it," he said. "Working with Medsphere, our goal is to enable hospitals and providers to improve care and efficiency without incurring massive ongoing costs."

ChartLogic executives note that in 2010 ChartLogic became the first EHR in the country to meet Stage 1 meaningful use requirements. Today, the EHR is certified for Stage 2, and the ChartLogic team is working on Stage 3.

Derived from the VistA system developed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the Indian Health Service, the OpenVista EHR platform combines both clinical and financial applications. Medsphere's Government Services Division also applies extensive knowledge of VistA to development and testing work for the VA and Indian Health Service.