The 12th Vista community meeting was held in Boston Massachutsetts April 7th-10th, 2005. The event was organized by WorldVistA and hosted by Intersystems. There were many, many goings on at the event, including installation workshops, histories of VistA and MUMPS as well as major announcements by the Pacific Telehealth and Technology Hui of the formation of the VistA Institute and Medsphere‘s enhancements to the VA fileman. Aric Stewart from Codeweavers was there working on problems of using CPRS on Wine (recently reported by Linux Medical News). Read More for details. Many thanks to Nancy Anthracite for all of these details.

Per Nancy Anthracite: ‘Intersystems did a great job as host of the event. They provided food, physical plant, tech support, TLC, a view of the Charles River and good weather!’

The Pacific Telehealth and Technology Hui announced the VistA Institute which ‘…is a training and certification program which will:

• Provide installation, configuration, operation, and maintenance instructions and guidelines for VistA and Hui OpenVista�
• Provide quality assurance testing and validation of Hui OpenVista� documentation
  Complete �gap� documentation for VistA and Hui OpenVista�
• Transfer, implement, maintain the VistA Institute Document Library…’ the Institute will be a ‘…Formal training and certification program for: System Administrators, Clinical Application Coordinators, [and have] Comprehensive online and searchable reference library for VistA and Hui OpenVista� validated for accuracy and correctness…’Nancy Anthracite wrote in about: Medsphere‘s enhancements to VA fileman, a core element of
  VistA, made by George Timson, who works for Medsphere. The audience was very enthusiastic about both the significant improvements to Fileman and Screenman and the fact that it is to be released to open source. The ability to use the mouse to navigate Screenman is particularly attractive as it makes the navigation of Screenman forms much more like the navigation of the typical of GUI interfaces and thus much more user friendly for the naive user. The WorldVistA meeting attendees eagerly await the release of these enhancement by Medsphere. Unfortunately, there was no information available about how soon the enhancements would be released to the open source community…’

  Finally there were many other discussions, announcements and presentations such as a revival of a M (MUMPS) language standards committee, the announcement that GT.M will possibly be ported to Macintosh OS X, a presentation by researchers at University of South Florida for interdisciplinary research using VistA, as well as a party honoring MUMPS pioneers. John Leo Zimmer did a demonstration of his installation of coLinux on a Windows system that allowed him to run VistA on GT.M for demonstration purposes. Bob Lafond discussed a VistA training class he will be offering covering many aspects of VistA that those who are interested in using VistA might be interested in. His web site is here.