infoTECH Feature

April 03, 2012

DSS and OSEHRA Looking to Make VistA Work Across Multiple Platforms

DSS Inc. has long been well-known as one of the top providers of support and software development when it comes to the VistA program. This is not Microsoft (News - Alert) Windows Vista but rather a program that allows many people to operate on the same system in government or private business databases as a team.  

Most recently VistA has helped hospital employees to better manage their patient care with real time updates. Now the company has signed a partnership with Open Source (News - Alert) Electronic Health Record Agent (OSEHRA). OSEHRA is a not for profit organization that was founded by the Department of Veterans Affairs in an attempt to formulate a national electronic health records database.

DSS will come into play by supporting OSEHRA’s code convergence project and working with several industry innovators in order to come up with a common and open source model of the VistA program. Once this open source model of VistA is up and running, OSEHRA and DSS believe that it will be able to operate across the department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Defense (DoD) and a myriad of commercial hospitals.

This VistA project uses quite a bit of crowdsourced information as a platform to set up the first standard requirements baseline for this model of VistA. By doing it this way, the model will be identical and uniform across different databases and facilities. This will lead to more developers and experts in the way that VistA operates to make changes on one central program instead of having to update every model for every different system that the program is running on.

DaCosta Barrow, chief operating officer of OSEHRA explained why his organization is looking forward to working with DSS on this project. “We are excited to work with DSS on our code convergence project, as they are at the heart of our mission with more than 20 years of experience in VistA development, implementation and maintenance,” Barrow said. “As we work to uncover best practices for open source EHR software, DSS’ contributions to our collaborative community will be incredibly valuable, especially given its unique perspective in open source software for commercial settings.”






Edited by Jennifer Russell
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