Astronaut 12.10 (Glenn) Astronaut VistA Installer Suite (Astronaut) is a easy install package for VistA. More information here.

• Latest MSC Fileman 1043. It is now located in routines directory no longer in patches directory.
• Latest dEWDrop based distribution with VA VistA patches up to early 2011 (thanks to all).
• Latest Enterprise Web Developer with easy to install yum or apt-get install ewd-astro (gets you all the way to a browser session) https encryption installed by default.
• Regression tested and bug fixes so that all the TMG goodies work (tmg-cprs, VistA-config).

The VA has awarded the long-anticipated VistA Open Source custodial agent contract to TIAG. “…The vendor, TIAG, is a management and technology services company, which has performed business process and clinical applications work for the Defense Department…”

Astronaut and TMG have announced that the Astronaut VistA Installer Suite version 1.0 release candidate 2 contains usable growth charts in the TMG-CPRS reports tab for the first time in VistA history.

Open Source Community, below is a letter that you can personalize and post on the public comment website. It is very important that you do this, the policy and the press is on fire and our duty is to educate our policy makers.

2 things you must do to help:
Post your letter here: http://www.regulations.gov/search/Regs/home.html#submitComment?R=0900006480a7c4a8 And fax, email, or cal your representatives.

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Dr. Matthew King, Edgeware Technologies and Mr. Djien So have collaborated over the last 3 years to develop a VistA compatible, high quality, multi-featured Practice Management System. The PMS will be released with the Affero v3 GPL open source license.

Full press release after the break. Continue reading →

Computerworld has an article that discusses Open Source EMR’s and one persons experience in not choosing VistA due to missing parts.

A whole new era for Veterans Affairs VistA has begun with Kevin Toppenberg, MD’s new TMG-CPRS 1.0.26.76 (TMG v1.1) client. The new tmg-cprs client enables clinical notes to be rendered in html. This allows mixed typefaces, bold, center, right justification, left justification and italics in clinical notes while maintaining compatibility with Veterans Affairs cprs.

Dr. Toppenberg announced on the Hardhats list.

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A broad range of VistA community members with diverse VistA backgrounds have proposed VistA Standard Base specification release candidate 8. The proposed document is intended to guide installation of Veterans Affairs VistA system on Linux using the Free/Open Source GTM mumps compiler. The text and public comment can be found here under the auspices of the Liberty Health Software Foundation a 501 c3 corporation.

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For you VA VistA fans, here is the status of GUI-registration which has recently changed with tmg-cprs. In case you didn’t know, patient registration up until recently was text-based and somewhat annoying in an otherwise good system:

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Tom Munnecke the designer of VA’s Mailman has a remarkable article with some fascinating history of VA’s Mailman, what the future for Health ITcould hold and some warnings of unintended consequences: ‘…Beware Stimulating the Perversity of the Health Care system. Their are huge perverse incentives are “baked in” to our Disease Industrial Complex. The commodity of this industry is disease, not health. Regardless of the good intentions and expectations of individuals, the system forces them into less-than-virtuous behavior. The current stimulus effort runs the risk of unintended consequences of stimulating the perversity of our system rather than the virtues we seek. For example, it would appear that the greatest financial value derived from a universally available health record would be increased malpractice suits, because they would be able to program scanners that could automatically scan historical records with 20/20 hindsight and find some instance of an activity that in retrospect was the wrong path to take. This in turn will lead to an even greater emphasis on defense medical practices…’