What's at Stake in VistA Project
By Bob Brewin

October 20, 2009

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substantive recommendations on ways to modernize a system that works very well but is written in software code that is outdated and difficult to maintain."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.