Industry group urges VA to embrace open source

Replacing the Veterans Affairs Department's electronic health record system with an open source system would allow the agency to innovate quicker and reduce costs, according to a May 6 report from an industry association.  

The VA's current system, the VA Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture, called VistA, was developed in the 1980s with a programming language known as MUMPS and is difficult to maintain and upgrade. The department has known for years now that VistA requires replacement but an effort to develop a modernized architecture framework for a new system has been bogged down. Some modernization components have been suspended as part of a VA-wide re-evaluation of IT programs.

The report, by the Fairfax, Va.-based Industry Advisory Council and done at the request of VA Chief Information Officer Roger Baker, recommends that  VA replicate screen-by-screen, and interface-by-interface if possible, the current legacy system into a open source environment. Both the open source replication and the legacy system would have to operate side-by-side during a transition period, but thereafter prototyping new applications and releasing test data for research purposes would be much easier, the report states. VistA 2.0 would operate more as an open-source ecosystem with a sand box application development environment, it adds.

Successfully coding an open source VistA 2.0 would require contracting with a federally funded research and development center to develop technical specifications and build a prototype, the report states. It would also require the VA taking a highly visible and active role in governance over the open source effort, it adds.

Using open source would also increase the chances of the VA system being adopted elsewhere, whether on a national or international level, the report notes. President Obama--and while in office, his predecessor, George W. Bush--has called for nationwide adoption of digital health records by 2014.

For more:
- read the IAC report (.pdf)

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