VeHU Training Site Pilot Opens April 26

Huge news for the VistA community. The VA's eHealth University will be launching a pilot for a new training web site on April 26. The site, MyVeHUCampus, will feature the VistA-based Health IT training materials available to the VA staff. With over 300,000 daily users in their healthcare system, the Department of Veterans Affairs has developed over the years the most extensive, deep, and thorough Health IT training materials and courses of any institution in the world. The pilot will allow VA staff to determine storage and bandwidth necessary for a production site.

These materials, as well as attendance to the annual VeHU conference, used to be available to the American public. However, based on what our sources have told us, under pressure from proprietary vendors and their Congressional lackeys, the VA was forced to close public access to the VA's training web site and conferences. Proprietary EHR vendors were apparently livid that these high quality training materials were free to any user of VistA in the private sector. It is well known that compared to the VA, training materials from proprietary vendors are generally inferior and quite limited, and their customers have to pay substantial amounts of money for them. Access was ended years ago without any warning or explanation to the VistA community. This happened despite the fact that the development of these courses had been paid for by American taxpayers and providing them to the public did not incur the VA additional costs.

In an interview with Open Health News, Nancy Anthracite, President of WorldVistA, was ecstatic. She said that "the community has been eagerly awaiting the day that the site would again be available." Anthracite believes that the change is policy is the result of the change in administration as well as the efforts of key VA employees that worked hard to see these valuable materials available to the public once again. More details on MyVeHUCampus can be found in this online newsletter.