AMA News has a story about CMS efforts with VistA Office Electronic Health Record or VOE: ‘The grand plans of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to create a national health information network will soon be off to a humble start. CMS plans to recruit five to 10 small group practices to test what it hopes will become a widely used electronic medical record. However, if physicians were hoping to get a free system from the CMS, they’re out of luck. Even those participating in the test will have to pay.

The select group of practices will take a year-long test drive of the VistA-Office Electronic Health Record software, which is a modification of the EMR that U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs hospitals have used for 20 years. CMS says that after a post-test evaluation of undetermined length, it would release a full production version of the software…’ Link courtesy of Nancy Anthracite