Senate majority leader Bill Frist in the Washington Times has weighed in on the subject of electronic medical records in general and VistA in particular: ‘…The Veterans Affairs Department hospital system — once widely loathed — has almost entirely turned itself around, thanks largely to a well designed computer system called Vista. When the New England Journal of Medicine used 11 measures to compare VA patients with Medicare patients treated on a fee-for-service basis, the VA’s patients were in better health and received more appropriate treatment, though Medicare-paid care, on average, actually costs more than services from VA hospitals…For more than 20 years, the private sector has tried to set standards to make these records interchangeable, interoperable and fully privacy protected. Efforts have never succeeded…’