Plan VI - OSEHRA Launching Internationalized Version of VistA

OSEHRA is pleased to announce the launch of a new initiative to create an internationalized version of the VistA Electronic Health Record (EHR) system. The internationalization effort, dubbed Plan VI, aims to expand VistA capability by making it compatible with various different languages and creating a reference implementation for global use.

VIENNA, Va. (PRWEB) August 28, 2018 - OSEHRA is pleased to announce the launch of a new initiative to create an internationalized version of the VistA Electronic Health Record (EHR) system. Originally developed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, VistA is periodically released to the public via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and enhanced by the OSEHRA community to create OSEHRA VistA, an open source resource for the entire EHR community. The internationalization effort, dubbed Plan VI, aims to expand VistA capability by making it compatible with various different languages and creating a reference implementation for global use.

“We are seeing substantial interest in open source EHR solutions from the international community, for both technical and economic reasons” said Seong K. Mun, PhD, President and CEO of OSEHRA. “Technically, the ability to take true ownership of the system and create customized solutions is very attractive, and the possibility of cloud-based collaboration and even cloud-based production is spiking international interest. Economically, leveraging high quality open source code and community collaboration can dramatically reduce both implementation and maintenance costs.”

International participants from South Korea (Pusan University; SooSangST Co., Inc. and Kyungpook National University), China (Harbin Institute of Technology), and the Kingdom of Jordan (Electronic Health Solutions) have already joined U.S. members DSS, Inc. and YottaDB, LLC in this exciting initiative. The workgroup is expected to grow rapidly. The result of this project will be a VistA version capable of storing and displaying information in any language using Unicode. The project will specifically include Korean, Chinese, German, and Arabic and the intent is to showcase use of glyph-based languages, a European language that uses a decimal comma, and a right-to-left written language. Development will consist of three stages: the Computerized Patient Record System (CPRS) interface, VistA’s internal Fileman / Roll-and-Scroll interface, and the HL7 data transfer standard.

OSEHRA highly encourages all organizations and individuals interested in contributing to join by visiting the Plan VI project page.

OSEHRA is a nonprofit organization that advances and enables the use of open source software in Government, with an emphasis on healthcare information technology. Founded in 2011, OSEHRA is a rapidly growing open source community with over 850 registered members representing 160+ industry, academic, and government organizations. They host software repositories for managing applications such as the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ VistA electronic health record, Blue Button, popHealth®, and others. OSEHRA is a member of global industry associations including the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), Health Level 7 (HL7), Open Source Initiative (OSI), and Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE).

OSEHRA’s membership roster is comprised of 30 Organizations and over 750 Individual Members. Organizational Members include: InterSystems, Inc.; DSS, Inc.; Perspecta; CGI; Cognosante; HSPC; Microsoft; and The MITRE Corporation. To see a full list of Organizational Members, visit https://www.osehra.org/content/organizational-members. To learn more about OSEHRA, please visit osehra.org.