Remembering an IT Hero

There is a beautiful tribute video on YouTube that I encourage you to watch.

Most people outside of the healthcare information technology business don't think of programmers as being particularly heroic folk. But if saving people's lives is heroic, you can do that in a number of ways.

Most recently, we've placed the hero's mantle on a group of highly skilled and daring soldiers who dropped into a walled compound in a far-off land and shot a very bad man in the head. We hope their heroic actions will save some lives in times to come.

But who can argue that the armies of programmers, who, over the past three decades, have labored to develop the U.S. Veterans Affairs Department’s electronic health-record system, haven't saved thousands of veterans' lives from preventable medical errors? That’s given the efficacy of the VA’s VistA EHR system, as analyzed by the Center for Information Technology Leadership.

One of the visionaries and founding fathers of the health IT program at the VA in 1977 was Joseph Timothy "Ted" O’Neill, who died in March at the age of 79. Tom Munnecke, one of the early VA programmers, put together the video tribute to O’Neill.