VA testing cash prizes to improve its health record system

The Department of Veterans Affairs is trying out a new concept for IT acquisition. Rather than paying vendors to build systems according to rigorous government specifications that might, one day, meet the agency's mission, it's offering cash prizes to any vendor who can prove their product successfully integrates with its electronic health records system.

The system, VistA, is used to manage patient records throughout the VA healthcare system and in some private-sector hospitals. In 2011, the department released the entire system into the open source software world, committing that VistA and any improvements VA made to it would be freely available to the public.

But VA still needs to upgrade and modernize major components of VistA, such as the system's scheduling module. So it's offering up prizes worth $3 million to developers who can deliver one that's compatible with the open source version of VistA. "It's a different way of doing acquisition for us," said Roger Baker, the department's assistant secretary for information and technology. "It greatly reduces what we're buying, and it greatly increases the selection that we have."