U.S. Army Col. Drew Kosmowski said the Iraqis are fully onboard with plans to install VistA throughout their military and civilian healthcare systems. The advent of VistA could mean that disparate factions in Iraq might move one tiny step closer toward national unity.

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We could have done better than Medicare or the cumbersome health reforms, most of which won't take effect until 2014, if the nation wasn't so stuck in an ideological rut. One great alternative is called socialized medicine and it's practiced right here in the U.S.--the Veterans Administration hospitals and health services.

Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric K. Shinseki announced today the selection of 26 winning ideas in the Veterans Health Administration / Office of Information and Technology (VHA/OIT) Innovation Competition.

This is the most recent effort under the VA Innovation Initiative, a department-wide program that brings the most promising innovations to VA’s most important challenges by involving employees and the private sector in the creation of visionary solutions in service to Veterans.

VA Secretary Eric Shinseki announced May 28 the 26 winning entries of an in-house competition held by the VA's Office of Information & Technology to come up with innovative ideas for using IT to improve services to veterans.

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Representatives from the Iraqi Ministries of Defense and Health and the Kurdistan Ministry of Health signed a memorandum of agreement earlier this month that will facilitate the implementation of an integrated, comprehensive health information system.

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A Defense Department media contractor is reporting that three Iraqi government healthcare organizations will test at a Baghdad military hospital an open-source version of the VistA electronic health-record system developed and used by the Veterans Affairs Department.

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The Veterans Affairs Department hospital in Indianapolis will participate in a pilot project to exchange veterans' health information with private-sector healthcare organizations via the Indiana Health Information Exchange, the VA announced.

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As we are departing Iraq, the U.S. military will be training the Iraqi health care IT personnel in their Ministries of Defense and Health along with the Kurdish Ministry of Health to develop and implement the WorldVistA electronic medical record and management system throughout the country. This system is based on the U.S. Veterans Health Administration’s VistA system that has been improving health care for our veterans for over 30 years and is available by Freedom of Information Act as an open source system.