Modern healthcare has an article (registration required) about deploying the Veterans Affairs VistA electronic medical record in Mexico: ‘Mexico has installed in 21 government-owned hospitals the core VistA information system developed by the U.S. Veterans Affairs Department, along with several key applications, and the technology could be in place at up to 100 Mexico-owned hospitals by year-end, according to a health service official there….Mexico is likely to be the largest VistA implementation in the world within three years, with several hundred hospitals running at least the basic system…’ What does Mexico know that the United States does not?

Here are some details of the Midland, Texas 7 hospital deployment of VistA by Medsphere: ‘…The cost of fully implementing OpenVista will be US$7.1 million (NZ$10.1 million), half of what it would have been if the hospital had gone with commercial software, he says.

Implementing OpenVista required six months of initial development work starting in March 2005 before the first hospital application, a pharmacy application, went live in October. The laboratory application went live in early December.

Over the past two weeks, the hospital has taken other applications live, including its first clinical unit EHR software as well as EHR capabilities for a nursing unit and its same-day surgery unit…’