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?
Category Archives: VistA
Midland VistA Deployment Details
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…’
Senator Endorses VistA for EHR Standard
In a Hospital Connect editorial, Delaware senator Tom Carper has endorsed the Veterans Affairs VistA software as a reference model for a national standard EHR: “…Efforts are underway within the federal government to ensure that all health care providers will be able to use IT in a uniform and secure way. Mike Leavitt, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, recently announced the creation of a new commission charged with devising a set of national health IT standards…We don�t need to reinvent the wheel to come up with standards that will work…For the past 10 years, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the nation�s largest central health care system with more than a thousand medical centers, nursing homes and outpatient clinic across the country, has been using an EHR with amazing results.” Read more for the full text of the article.
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.”
WSIS Tunis Journal
What follows is a travelogue by WorldVistA director Chris Richardson from San Francisco, California to the recent World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) meeting in Tunis, the capital city of Tunisia located in northwest Africa. WorldVistA is a group ‘focused on further developing and supporting the growing global VistA [electronic medical record] community.’
(Editor’s note: dates are in VistA format � 305 is the year 2005.)
Tunis Journal � 3051113 � The Pre-Board
Gentle readers;
This is a journey which holds a lot of exploration and discovery about the differences and similarities between various peoples. Having run the gauntlet of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system to find the my way to the San Francisco Airport, I found a large contingent on BART heading toward football game (49ers vs. somebody). Sitting there listening to them discuss the various players casually and making comment about the players in a familiar way as if the players were an extended family. The fans got off and the Opera Ladies got onto BART as we made our way to the San Francisco Airport.
HITS: Worth the Effort
WorldVistA president Rick Marshall has an article on page 9 (you may have to search on ‘Marshall’) of Health IT Strategist about VistA: ‘…The secret to its success does not lie in specific features or the technology used. It is a dynamic, hyperactive life cycle that engages the creativity of tens of thousands of users…’
Augustin Out, Kizer In at Medsphere
VistA provider Medsphere has a press release announcing its new CEO Ken Kizer, MD, MPH replacing Larry Augustin of VA Linux and Sourceforge fame: ‘…Kizer has long been an advocate of information technology as an enabler for improving healthcare safety and quality. He recognized the critical importance of healthcare IT when he was Under Secretary for Health in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and pioneered the system-wide implementation of an electronic health record, bar code medication administration, and other IT innovations years before the healthcare industry embraced the importance of IT.
“In my new role as CEO, I will be able to focus on broadly disseminating a proven healthcare IT solution that has been adapted and improved for commercial healthcare use,” said Kizer. “I believe that Medsphere’s approach to healthcare IT represents a disruptive technology that has the potential to fundamentally change the healthcare IT paradigm and revolutionize the whole industry.”
VistA and MUMPS: Big, Ugly and Proud
The Veterans Affairs (VA) VistA Electronic Medical Record is based on MUMPS, a programming language designed specifically for healthcare in the 1960’s. People and organizations are rarely neutral on both public domain VistA-the-software, and MUMPS the language. VistA the software is almost universally liked by the doctors and nurses of the VA doing clinical work. VistA and MUMPS is also loathed by programmers, competitors and outsiders to the VA. VistA is big, the language it is written in is ugly, they say. Yet there is a jarring contradiction. By most accounts and measures the software, works and works well. The MUMPS language also seems to work for private sector EMR companies such as Epic. In a field that is littered with the corpses of companies that have tried and failed to create useful, commercially viable EMR software, this success counts for a lot. Why is it so successful?
Breaking News: CMS Releases Beta VOE
September 19th, 2005 CMS released an ‘evaluation version’ of the highly anticipated Vista Office EHR (VOE) according to this CMS website press release. Highlights of the press release are that apparently CMS is going to evaluate how implementations are working at a limited number of beta test sites, then consider standards for ‘certification criteria and process’ through WorldVistA. More information, including system requirements and what makes a beta test site can be found at www.vista-office.org. There does not appear to be a place in which anyone can download the software and I read this to mean there probably won’t be one unless you qualify as a beta test site or qualified vendor. Click Read More for the full text of the CMS announcement.
VistA Office EHR Delay Continues
Delay of the widely anticipated release of VistA Office EHR that was expected to happen August 1st continues. Modern physician (intrusive registration required) has an article on the subject: ‘…The CMS, in partnership with the Veterans Affairs Department, announced in the summer of 2004 that it would adapt for use in physician offices the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture, a clinical information system that runs in nearly all 1,300 healthcare sites in the Veterans Health Administration.