VA-DoD Joint EHR to be Commercial, Not Necessarily Proprietary

The future Veterans Affairs and Defense Department joint electronic health record system will not necessarily be built on proprietary software, said VA Chief Information Officer Roger Baker--despite a leaked memo that emphasizes "commercial solutions" for the project. 

"VA and DoD have agreed that VA's use of open source as the model for development of VistA fits within our mutual plans for the Joint Common Electronic Health Record," Baker said in a statement to FierceGovernmentIT.

Leaked minutes (.pdf) from a March 17 meeting of DoD and VA officials said the agencies are looking to purchase commercially available solutions for joint use and "adopt a Department-developed application if a modular commercial solution is not available and one Department has a solution."

"People often use 'commercial' and 'proprietary' interchangeably," said Gunnar Hellekson, chief technology strategist for Red Hat's U.S. Public Sector group, making it difficult to determine what type of solution is sought by DoD and VA. Agencies should treat open source software as a type of commercial software, following guidance in a 2004 Office of Management and Budget memo (.pdf) and a 2009 DoD memo (.pdf) on the subject.

"Open source is, especially in the government marketplace, something you need to explain a lot about," conceded Baker in a March 28 press call.