According to this slashdot story: ‘”Remember how the VA was pinning the theft of 26.5 million veterans’ personal records on a hard working-but-renegade employee whose laptop was stolen? Surprise! It turns out that the employee had written permission to bring the sensitive data home. Fortunately, the laptop has been recovered. It is still unclear how the laptop was recovered, or if any of the veterans’ personal data was leaked.”‘ The best quote I heard is that databases like this one are becoming like plutonium, very concentrated and potentially very destructive in the wrong hands.

Joseph DalMolin writes on the Openhealth list: “WorldVistA is delighted to announce the 13th VistA Community Conference, to be held from Thursday, June 29th to Sunday, July 2nd, 2006 at Robert Morris University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The theme for this meeting is: �Building sustainable, global, collaborative development of VistA�, exploring the interrelated issues of:” Read on for more information. Calendar and registration information here.

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GT.M is a GNU GPL licensed MUMPS compiler capable of compiling the Veterans Administration VistA software. In a nutshell, this release has bug fixes and enables the use of gcc optimization flags for better performance. K.S. Bhaskar announced on the hardhats list: ‘GT.M V5.0-000D is available at Source Forge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/sanchez-gtm). This release provides timely fixes to several bugs, as noted in the release notes on the GT.M
user documentation page (http://www.sanchez-gtm.com/user_documentation/V5_0-000D_docset/GTM_V5.0-000D_Release_Notes.html).’

In addition to bug fixes, GT.M source code was modified to use ANSI C stdargs.h style of variable argument list parameter passing instead of the earlier K&R C varargs.h style. This change enabled the use of optimizer flags with the gcc C compiler, reducing CPU usage by GT.M applications on the x86 GNU/Linux platform. The change is internal to GT.M and has no functional or operational impact.

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While the article does not properly credit the actual authors of VistA or even mention the famous VistA Underground Railroad Fortune does have an article talking about how technology has improved the VA hospital system.

The effort within the Veterans Affairs hospitals to re-write in Java the Computerized Patient Record System (CPRS) client software is said to have been re-started. The project, known as CPRS-R, is to convert the VA’s graphic user interface client for clinicians from Borland’s Kylix to Java. The project had stalled for a lengthy period of time.

“The Pacific Telehealth & Technology Hui (�Hui�) announced the release of Hui OpenVista� Version 4.0, the first major release upgrade of the non-proprietary, open-source healthcare information system since its initial launch in June 2003…The most notable enhancement to Hui OpenVista 4.0 is a more streamlined installation process. Version 4.0 provides a preconfigured baseline system that simplifies the steps needed to convert the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) version of VistA to Hui OpenVista. This enables users to quickly download the baseline as a starting point for configuring the system to their specific requirements…” Read on for the complete announcement and link.

News Release FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

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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…’

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.

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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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