VistA Named one of top 10, oldest, most significant Open Source Projects

I just noticed that the VA VistA Electronic Health Record System was named as one of The 10 oldest, significant open-source programs in the company of Linux, Python, Perl, and other software.   Back in the early days of VistA, the term “Open Source” didn’t exist – we called it “public domain.”

What makes VistA unique in this list is that it is more than just code, it is a longitudinal data base extending back over 30 years across 172 hospitals and millions of patients.  This is an irreplaceable resource – VistA has petabytes of information about clinical conditions, activities, locations, and demographics from a period when most other hospitals were just dreaming about putting their records online.  This information is mapped by a “data dictionary” – a “road map” to the data base that defines the semantics (what it means) of the data, not just the syntax (how it is formatted).  It is also structured around a network model of information (the connectors between the dots), rather than just a hierarchical model (think of how the Dewey Decimal System tries to form a hierarchy of the books in a library)...