30th VistA Community Meeting

The VistA community is holding its 30th VistA Community Meeting at the UC Davis Sacramento Campus January 16-18. The meeting is going to be addressed by a wide range of speakers, from current and former top officials of the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and Indian Health Service (IHS), to leading innovators for the Vista and RPMS EHRs. The goal of these meetings is to create a collaborative conference where VistA Community can network and collaborate, i.e., to share ideas and work, with the objective of moving VistA & the VistA community forward. UC Davis School of Medicine, is providing the facilities for the meeting.

Compared to most meetings, VistA Community Meetings are relatively unstructured.  The agenda is always a draft agenda, because attendees are free to change it – even during the meeting – in order to  better meet their objectives. VistA Community Meetings were originally almost exclusively technical meetings.  Over time, the balance shifted, so that although there are technical presentations, there are more discussions on other aspects, including implementation, support, demonstration, education, training, and community collaboration.

Key presenters will be Roger Baker and Howard Hays, former CIOs of the VA and IHS respoctively, as well as Aaron J. Drew, Senior Enterprise Solutions Architect, and Paul Tibbits, MD, CIO Architecture, Strategy, and Design and the VA. Stephen Oxley, MD,  Chief Medical Officer (CMO), and Joe Thurber, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), of Central Regional Hospital in North Carolina will be giving an update on their VistA implementation. In addition there will be a delegation from Jordan with an update on the Hakeem project-the implementation of VistA across the entire nation.

Two courses will be offered previous to the conference. K.S Bhaskar will teach a 4-day intensive course on GT.M that will take place from Monday, January 12 through Thursday, January 15th. Rob Tweed will teach a 3-day EWD.js course from Tuesday, January 13 through Thursday, January 15th.

Come prepared to introduce yourself and discuss your interest in and work with VistA as talking with the other attendees at the meeting is a least half of the reason to come to the meetings.  If you wish to present material, please contact Nancy Anthracite.  If you think you might decide to give a presentatino, bring your presentation with you as things can be added to the agenda at the last minute.  Also, we encourage you to bring your laptop to the meeting with you. It seems like there is always someone who regrets not having brought it so they can install VistA or try the latest and greatest software while they are at the meeting.

Speakers List (as of 12/29)

• Aaron J. Drew, Senior Enterprise Solutions Architect, VA
• Alan Montgomery, National Support, Reminders, VA
• Dave Whitten, CTO WorldVistA & Central Regional Hospital VistA Manager
• Don Hewitt, Vice President, Business Operations, OSEHRA
• Ghai Al-Kuoz, MD Clinical Transformation Manager, EHS, Jordan
• Howard Hays, former CIO of the Indian Health Service
• Jason Hawsey, CPRS Developer, VA
• Joe Thurber, CTO, Central Regional Hospital
• Joel Ivey, Coding Using the M editor for Eclipse
• Joel Mewton, Senior Software Engineer, Bitscopic
• Keith Magoon, Project Manager for Immunizations, VA
• KS Bhaskar, FIS, Development Director
• Michael Hogarth, MD FACP, Professor and Vice Chair of Informatics, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and Professor, Department of Internal Medicine, UC Davis
• Nancy Van Ness Open Source Drug Interaction Databases, VA
• Noam Arzt, PhD, HLN Consulting
• Olivier Bodenreider, MD PhD, Chief, Cognitive Science Branch, National Library of Medicine
• Patrick Redington, Programmer for Reminders, VA
• Paul Tibbits, MD, CIO Architecture, Strategy, and Design, VA
• Rick Marshall, VistA Expertise Network
• Roger Baker, former CIO of the VA and Chief Strategy Officer Agilex Technologies
• Roger Sigley, Director, Clinical Ancillary & Terminology Products, VA
• Sidney Tarason, CEO / Lead Programmer, Astute Semantics
• Stephen Oxley, MD,  CMO, Central Regional Hospital
• Zeid M AbuGosh, MD, CMO EHS, Jordan