The VA Wants To Use Open Source To Make Electronic Health Records Better

For years now the health care industry has been in search of a uniform, unified, interchangeable health record format that would allow different systems and different providers to share and use information seamlessly. Even with HIPAA, Hi-Tech and everything else, there has not been one health record format that has become the standard.

Now the Veterans Administration is enlisting the help of open source to make their VistA format that universal format. They have released an RFI that seeks to build consensus around the organization and character of an open source ecosystem to support it.

Like so many things the Federal Government gets involved in, deciding to enlist open source help around VistA seems to be made a bit more complicated. The RFI lays out a strategy to establish a custodial agent to handle the management of the open source code.