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VistA

July 2, 2014 -- I have written about VistA before, and it's time to revisit it, prompted by Paul Berlin's The VA Waitlist Fiasco: VistA should not be thrown out with the bathwater.

See also Mr. Longman's testimony before Congress (linked in Mr. Berlin's article) that faults not the quality of the health care provided by the VA but rather the barriers to access to it.

Similarly, the VA's VistA EHR deserves none of the blame game being played by opportunistic media and cynical politicians. On the contrary, the rest of the Health Information Technology (HIT) industry would do well -- indeed should be obliged by legislation and thoughtfully-crafted financial incentives -- to follow VistA's example.

This would include respecting and implementing data-sharing standards (rather than the silos created and defended by self-serving vendors) and the software quality and longevity that can happen when computer code is open-sourced. VistA has done these things and should be held up as a model for the rest of the industry, not, as Mr. Berlin quips, "thrown out with the bathwater."

This is an important message and I hope the buyers and decision-makers don't just blindly make the "safe" choices as, decades ago, it was said that, "You won't get fired for buying IBM." Where did that get us?

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