Help A US Gov't Agency Switch To Open Source, Win $3 Million

Veterans Affairs holding contest to upgrade systems

The US Department of Veterans Affairs is looking to upgrade the 25-year-old software that powers its nationwide health care system, and it's betting real money that open source is the way to do it. To that end, the agency is sponsoring a contest in which three entrants will be awarded prizes of up to $3m each, provided they can demonstrate software based on open source code and open APIs (application programming interfaces) that can successfully replace components of the VA's current systems...

Today, VistA is still considered one of the health care industry's best electronic health record (EHR) systems. The fact that it powers the VA's 152 hospitals and 971 outpatient clinics – the largest health care network in the US – is testament to its quality. But VistA is long in the tooth, and years of government bureaucracy have caused its development to stagnate. By reinventing VistA as community-maintained open source software, the VA hopes to gain the benefits of faster updates and higher-quality code, without all the red tape.

To facilitate its open source facelift, in August 2011 the VA joined with the Department of Defense to form the Open Source Electronic Health Record Agent (OSEHRA), a nonprofit organization with the goal of overseeing community-based development of VistA and its related components...