VA lays roadmap to certify VistA for meaningful use

The Veterans Affairs Department is preparing a roadmap toward meaningful use certification of its VistA electronic health record version that is being updated and improved in the OSEHRA open source community. The Open Source Electronic Health Record Agent (OSEHRA), a non-profit organization, manages a public/private community formed to modernize VistA for open source and to contribute to the VA-Defense Department’s integrated electronic health record (iEHR).

Certification of the OSEHRA VistA, however, may not be realized until 2014, according to Dr. Theresa Cullen, director of health informatics at the Veterans Health Administration and former CIO at the Indian Health Service. IHS was the first federal agency to receive meaningful use certification of its EHR, which is based on VistA. VA has formed an internal work group to get the process moving toward certification of VistA.

“We’re in the process. We’ve done modular certification already for about 10 modules,” she told Government Health IT at an Oct. 17 OSEHRA conference. VA also will redo the gap analysis it performed two years ago in order to identify any changes in the code, and then release to the open source community the modifications to support certification...