VistA Needs ‘Dramatic Vision,' Programmers Say

Two longtime programmers at the VistA Community Meeting [...] offered a history of the U.S. Veterans Affairs Department's VistA electronic health-record system and a way forward for VA and military brass planning an estimated $28 billion retooling of VistA and a counterpart EHR within the Military Health System.

Two longtime programmers at the VistA Community Meeting Monday at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., offered a history of the U.S. Veterans Affairs Department's VistA electronic health-record system and a way forward for VA and military brass planning an estimated $28 billion retooling of VistA and a counterpart EHR within the Military Health System.

The meeting is being held by WorldVistA, a not-for-profit organization that promotes the use of an open-source version of the VA's health IT system in the U.S. and abroad.

Programmer Tom Munnecke, who started working at the VA in 1978, noted that the VistA precursor, the Decentralized Hospital Computer Program, was developed in spite of opposition from a centralized IT bureaucracy at the VA in Washington. He likened the development of VistA to the development of the Internet, which relied on three basic open-source components—URLs, http and html. DHCP, in comparison, was based on acceptance of a common database and programming environment.