VistA in Egypt, an Interview with Omar H. El Hattab

Dr. Omar El Hattab was a Cancer Epidemiologist at the National Cancer Institute, Cairo University, Egypt. He was responsible for getting DHCP (the precursor to VistA) installed at his cancer institutes. In order to help Linux Medical News readers understand the challenges he faced in setting up the software in Arabic and English we present the following interview. “VistA is a comprehensive system that is tested and functioning. It is open source and that allowed us to make modifications on the code that was needed for Arabization. Also to modify the applications to the way things are done in Egypt and to the way our physicians do their work…many experts in the medical field shared in the development of the software (VistA), so it fits very well the work and the high standards of medical profession.”

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Building Interoperability Into Medical Information

Science Daily has an article on the ARTEMIS EMR interoperability project: �The healthcare interoperability problem can be investigated in two categories: Interoperability of the healthcare messages exchanged and interoperability of electronic healthcare records [EHRs],� says Professor Asuman Dogac, Director of the Software Research & Development Center at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey, and coordinator of the IST-funded ARTEMIS project. Editor’s Note: Missing from the article is a discussion of Free and Open Source electronic medical record (EMR) software can help with interoperability.