A Truly Open VistA

VistA’s a challenge. The community is notoriously fragmented as a result of regular FOIA requests for the VistA source code. The project is based on MUMPS, which a relatively unpopular platform, so developers for VistA are in short supply. Since there’s no clear mainstream for the project, the VA VistA project competes against this fragmented community for a shallow pool of developer talent. There’s the for-profit Medsphere, which has built its own offering called OpenVistA. There’s also the WorldVistA community and http://www.hardhats.org/. FOIA requests for VistA source code are so common that VistA appears on VA’s FOIA FAQpage, but few (if any) of the contributions from any private-sector VistA communities feed back into the VA VistA project.

"VA believes that VistA’s rate of innovation and improvement has slowed substantially, and the codebase is unnecessarily isolated from private sector components, technology, and outcome-improving impact. To address this issue, VA is establishing a mechanism that will open the aperture to broader-based public and private sector contributions."