US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)

See the following -

Data Exchange Vendor Metriport Adopts Open Source

Metriport is addressing a problem similar to other IT companies in health care—a service to ingest and clean patient data for tasks such as providing care summaries during a patient transition—but is doing so in a very unusual way: through an entirely open source service. Because the choice to go open source is so central to their business model, I will discuss the importance of free and open source software in health care, then explain Metriport's service.

Read More »

Defense Health shoring up IT ahead of EHR move

Amber Corrin | Federal Times | February 6, 2015

As the Defense Health Agency moves forward in pursuit of a new electronic health records system, officials there also are overhauling IT to become a more agile, responsive organization. Top priorities for the 2015-2016 time frame include the EHR, enterprise consolidation, interoperability with the Veterans Administration, application rationalization and the standardization of enterprise activities, according to Dave Bowen, DHA CIO and director of healthcare IT. Read More »

Detroit-Area Mental Health Clinics to Implement OpenVista Electronic Health Record

Press Release | Medsphere Systems Corporation | October 21, 2015

Medsphere Systems Corporation...today announced that the Behavioral Center of Michigan and Samaritan Behavioral Center, providers of inpatient behavioral health and related services in and around Detroit, will implement the company’s OpenVista® electronic health record (EHR). The Behavioral Center of Michigan, a 42-bed inpatient facility in the Detroit suburb of Warren, manages Samaritan, a 55-bed adult inpatient facility located in revitalizing Detroit. "The decision to go with OpenVista was based on both the reputation of VistA-based systems at VA and Indian Health Service hospitals and the success other Medsphere clients like Silver Hill Hospital have had with the system,” said Behavioral Center of Michigan CEO Ryan Gunabalan.

Read More »

Disrupting Healthcare IT - The Easy Way to Develop a Beautiful and Usable EHR User Interface

Despite the best endeavors of the “mainstream” IT community, it’s an interesting fact that the top-end of the EHR marketplace is dominated by systems that use an otherwise little-known and poorly-understood database technology: Mumps.  Not only does this represent something of a closed book to the outside development community – they universally balk at the idea of having to use this technology’s native language, but also the companies that have developed and own these EHRs keep their technology tightly under their own control. Read More »

DoD EHR Contract: Open Source Vs. Commercial

David F. Carr | Information Week | October 31, 2014

Pricewaterhouse Coopers and partner firms urge Department of Defense to consider open source VistA for EHR contract, vying against IBM/Epic and other commercial contenders. Read More »

DOD moves forward with department-wide e-health records project

Kevin McCaney | Defense Systems | April 23, 2014

The Defense Department has taken another step in its quest to create a new, departmentwide electronic health record. Read More »

DoD: New EHR not about interoperability with VA

Tom Sullivan | Healthcare IT News | July 30, 2015

When Defense Department officials briefed reporters prior to announcing that the Cerner, Leidos and Accenture team won its EHR modernization contract, they were adamant that so much speculation about the DoD’s ability to share patient information with the Department of Veterans Affairs had been unfounded. "There is not a big interoperability problem with the VA and DoD today," said Frank Kendall, DoD Under Secretary for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics. "It’s a big misconception out there that this software system we’re buying is about interoperability." Read More »

Ebola in the United States: Short on Accountable 'Open' Information, Effective Systems Planning and Decision Making

Events in the present Ebola crisis prompt unease that the United States deployment of Web based, standardized population health and biosurveillance information services is fragmented, incomplete and insufficient, prompting me to write this blog. The United States has made significant progress in public health and medical preparedness since the 9/11 terrorist attacks; yet, poorly interconnected information systems add to our vulnerability to planning and response to viruses like Ebola or enviro virus EV-D68 that threaten the health of large populations. Today, a gap exists between information technology specialists and public health programmatic or scientific personnel. 

Read More »

Electronic Health Records: First, Do No Harm?

David F. Carr | InformationWeek | June 26, 2014

EHRs are commonly promoted as boosting patient safety, but are we all being fooled? InformationWeek Radio investigates. Read More »

Epic Grabs VA Software Contract

Tom Sullivan | Healthcare IT News | August 27, 2015

Epic, along with Lockheed Martin subsidiary Systems Made Simple, inked a five-year $624 million contract with Veterans Affairs. The deal is nowhere near the $4.3 billon that DoD awarded Cerner and Leidos for the first phase, of course, but it does hold the potential for a big payoff – publicity-wise at least – because the work Epic and SMS signed up to undertake addresses one of VA's most public pain points: patient scheduling.

Read More »

EWD.js and VistA: Now With No Barriers to Entry

Over the past few weeks I’ve been busy.  Before explaining what I’ve been busy doing, I’ll start by stating my sincere thanks to Christopher Edwards (KRM Associates and Certification Manager at OSEHRA) for enhancing and extending his installer for VistA to include an option to automatically install, configure and fire up EWD.js. Read More »

FDA Issues RFQ for Large Scale EHR Study - Wants to Leverage VA's Open Source VistA EHR and Database for Research

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) yesterday issued a Request for Quotation (RFQ) for a large-scale electronic health record (EHR) system. This RFQ is very important as the objective is to develop a platform to support a critical project by the FDA's Division of Bioinformatics and Biostatistics (DBB) "to conduct research to assess the safety and surveillance of FDA regulated products through the FDA adverse event reporting systems..." Adverse drug reactions are one of the leading causes of death in the US, thus finding which drugs cause negative interactions is of vital importance. The project requires "use of the large electronic medical record (EMR) system..." The project is going to leverage the largest, most comprehensive, and clinically relevant medical records database, that of the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

Read More »

Feds' Rampant Use of No-Bid Contracts the Essence of Corruption

David Williams | The Hill | August 1, 2017

Secretary of Veterans Affairs (VA) David Shulkin just awarded a contract worth billions of dollars to Cerner, a health technology company. Secretary Shulkin, who was seeking a firm to build the VA's new electronic health records system, awarded the contract without even considering proposals from other companies...

Read More »

Feds' Rampant Use of No-bid Contracts the Essence of Corruption

David Williams | The Hill | August 1, 2017

Secretary of Veterans Affairs (VA) David Shulkin just awarded a contract worth billions of dollars to Cerner, a health technology company. Secretary Shulkin, who was seeking a firm to build the VA's new electronic health records system, awarded the contract without even considering proposals from other companies. Such "no-bid" contracts are an outrage. Companies seeking the government's business should compete on price and quality — just like firms that operate exclusively in the private sector...

Read More »

Flagship Project on Precision Medicine for Underserved Women Will Advance Learning Health System

Press Release | Open Source Health, Inc., Learning Health Community | March 1, 2016

Marc Wine, a supporter of the LHS - Precision Medicine PCOS Project and participant in Learning Health Community initiatives, who attended the summit hosted by the president said, "One goal is to seek collaboration with underserved communities in genomics, open data and integrative medicine. This will result in engaging individual patients in ways that will move them from dependency on fragmented healthcare to the point where patients can use their own evidence-based genetic information to make the very best health decisions." The Precision Medicine PCOS Project is aimed at developing a protocol for women with PCOS while employing an integrative medicine approach to treatment based on the participant's molecular makeup, clinical data and available scientific knowledge.

Read More »