As I reported last week, the Veterans Affairs Department asked the Industry Advisory Council for its help in modernizing its venerable, but more than two-decade-old, Veterans Health Information System and Technology Architecture, or VistA.
The first meeting of the IAC VistA Industry Advisory Council was held on Oct. 14 and in a press release issued today, Ed Meagher, chairman of the group and a former VA deputy chief information officer, said, "We are tasked with producing substantive recommendations on ways to modernize a system that works very well but is written in software code that is outdated and difficult to maintain."
Meagher, currently the director of strategic health initiatives at SRA International, added, "A new and more open approach would enable various sectors of the health care industry to leverage the significant investment the government has already made in VistA."
IAC plans to fulfill its charter in keeping the light on in the Obama administration transparency thing and launched a blog on Tuesday to report on its work.
In the blog, Meagher said more than 40 IAC members have joined the working group to help modernize VistA "not as representatives of their respective companies but as representatives of our industry and more importantly as concerned citizens of our country."
WorldVistA, a nonprofit that backs the use of open source VistA outside VA, also has signed on to the IAC effort. Joseph Dal Molin, who is working on a pilot test of VistA in the Kingdom of Jordan, said he viewed the IAC effort as "a landmark opportunity to gather together the wisdom and experience of the VistA community and communicate it's insights to VA leadership."
Writing on the VistA Hard Hats blog, which serves the VistA open source community, Dal Molin said the Vista Community, scheduled for early January in Tempe, Ariz., will focus on the work under way by the IAC VistA Working Group.
Dal Molin urged the open VistA community to help develop new graphical user interfaces for VistA, new functionality and new software platforms.
What do these IAC and WorldVistA efforts mean? It's simple, one knowledgeable source told me: development and deployment of an almost free electronic health record system clinicians and hospitals can download from the Internet.
And, since free VistA software could threaten the mega-billion dollar health care information technology industry, you can bet that there are a lot of folks who will do their darndest to ensure that the VistA modernization efforts go nowhere.
COMMENTS
I really believe that VistA based system have a lot of potential. DSS Inc is releasing vxVistA under EPL License and at the same time releasing a new Collaboration Environment with a solid platform that will provide the tools needed for development of new applications.
We are inviting you to visit the beta version and be among the first visitors to this environment. This new Collaboration Environment has been created to foster and support the use of VistA and is intended to be the focal point around which a new open source community will form. On the site, you will find forums where a broad range of VistA related questions and issues, both technical and functional can be discussed. You will also be able to download vxVistA, the new standard in open source EHR’s.
Open Health Tools and DSS, Inc. are sponsoring this website because we strongly believe that it takes a committed and involved community for open source software to be a success. We hope that you will take us up on our invitation, visit the website, provide feedback on what you like and don’t like and ultimately become part of the vxVistA.org community.
Fabian Lopez 01/02/10 12:58 am ET
I think its great to get a vendor group to comment on VistA. IAC/ACT is a great place for govt to communicate to its suppliers business development work force.
I can understand the motivation of reaching into a community of practice, recognizing that VA's largest contractors have failed to deliver open systems or interoperable solutions. However, it might want to augments BD agenda with other non-profit research institutes that are not focused on glad handing and influence peddling. I would include HIMSS to the mix as their community represents that world largest collection of Health IT providers, most of whom are not part of IAC.
Back in 1998, DoD took a similar approach bringing together 13 non-profits under the ECCWG (Electronic Commerce Conference Working Group), which helped Dr. Hamre, Dr. Gansler, Art Money and Stan Soloway develop a way forward for Clinger Cohen Act implementation. The coalition produced hard hitting, actionable roadmap that is still relevant today.
My fear is that agenda of most trade associations like IAC are really controlled by the largest integrators, who will not allow an objective review or an alternative strategy that disenfranchise the status quo. I am sure that VA will get what they pay for. In reality, they need a truly objective review of both government and contractor approaches that to date, have failed to deliver. You will not get this from potential suppliers who know that negative reviewers do not get contracts.
But again, its only a few billion at risk.
Honest Broker 10/22/09 08:52 am ET