Veterans Health Administration (VHA)

See the following -

OSEHRA 2012 Summit A Great Success

The 1st Annual Open Source EHR Summit held this week at the Gaylord National Conference Center at National Harbor, just outside Washington D.C., was well attended by over 400 participants. The event was a huge success and many of the participants openly voiced the belief that this effect will be seen as the tipping point for open source in healthcare. It was "unbelievably cool" according to one of the participants, Todd Park, the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the U.S. Government.

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OSEHRA 2013: Oroville Hospital CEO To Reveal Key Factors Behind their Successful Open Source EHR Self-Implementation

Press Release | Oroville Hospital | August 30, 2013

Robert Wentz, President and CEO of Oroville Hospital, will be addressing the Plenary Session of the 2nd Open Source Electronic Health Record Agent (OSEHRA) conference in Bethesda, MD, on September 5th. Wentz will discuss the key factors behind the hospital's successful self-implementation of the open source VistA EHR for less than $13 million in total and less than $7 million for the EHR component. Read More »

OSEHRA 2014: Deadline for Summit Abstract Submissions & Academic Competition is May 31st

The deadline for OSEHRA Summit 2014 abstract submissions and Academic Abstract Competition is coming up on June 7th. The OSEHRA Summit has become the premier open health conference and it is a unique opportunity to present the latest advancements in open source health information technology. This unique forum provides researchers with the opportunity to showcase their findings—resulting in action by government and industry leaders within the greater community. This year's Summit is modeled after last year's which featured more than 100 presentations during the breakout session, covering topics in policy, technology, clinical applications, business models, and others.

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OSEHRA 2014: Tweed, Rhodes and Timson Receive Awards During Open Source EHR Summit

Press Release | OSEHRA | September 18, 2014

The Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA) announced today the recipients of the 2014 OSEHRA Awards presented at the widely-attended 2014 OSEHRA Open Source Summit. Three outstanding individuals were recognized by the OSEHRA community for their leadership and contributions to health information technology and innovative healthcare. Read More »

OSEHRA 2014: UiEHR Presentation At Open Source EHR Summit

Peter Groen | COSI 'Open' Health | September 3, 2014

The Unified integrated Electronic Health Record (UiEHR) is a fully automated 'open architecture' solution initially designed for potential use by the Military Health System (MHS) and the Veterans Health Administration (VHA). It provides seamless real-time interoperability and data interchange between the EHR systems used by these two organizations...

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OSEHRA 2016 Summit to Address Global Open Health IT Issues as well as the Future of VistA, eHMP and the VA's Veteran's Centric Strategy

The 2016 OSEHRA Summit to be held June 27-29 is sixty days away, and we are very excited about the way it has come together...We will open the Summit on Monday afternoon with the Global Open Health Informatics Workshop. There we will hear about the progress of many programs, including those in India, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, Slovenia and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. This workshop will also address technical issues supporting the global deployment of open source EHRs.

OSEHRA 2016 Summit to Address Range of Open Health Projects from Global Health IT to the Next Steps for VistA

Can you believe that we are less than 2 weeks from the OSEHRA Summit?  We and the open source community have had an interesting year full of changes and success stories.  Our speakers will address all of these topics, including various aspects of VistA.  Many things have been said about VistA both publically and privately in the past couple of months, so I want to point your attention to our Summit’s approach.

OSEHRA 2017 Leadership Award Recipients Announced

Press Release | OSEHRA | June 30, 2017

The Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA) is pleased to announce this year’s OSEHRA Leadership Award winners. Numerous individuals were nominated this year and three were chosen through a vote by the OSEHRA community based on their outstanding achievements in health information technology and innovative health care. They were honored in a special ceremony during the 6th Annual OSEHRA Open Source Summit June 13-15, 2017 in Bethesda, MD...

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OSEHRA 2018 - Most Diverse Open Source EHR Summit to Date

Press Release | OSEHRA | July 11, 2018

This year's three-day OSEHRA Open Source Summit promises to be the most diverse ever, highlighting open source initiatives across a dozen Federal and State agencies, and showcasing industry progress in key areas such as emerging hybrid proprietary/open source interoperability solutions and synthetic patient data generation...This year's agenda includes a combination of engaging track sessions, town-hall discussion, and plenary events. The content will be exceptionally diverse, including: An interoperability platform demonstration drawing healthcare data from multiple health record systems; A demonstration of synthetic patient data generation, including the first public demonstration of tailored synthetic data being loaded into the open source VistA Electronic Health Record (EHR) via a new open source data loader...

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OSEHRA Community Undertakes Long-Elusive Alignment of VistA Code Base

Press Release | OSEHRA | November 25, 2014

The first Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA) VistA Code Alignment Workshop was held in Oakland, California, November 19-21, 2014. An unprecedented effort, the workshop brought together 27 principal developers of VistA from government and private organizations dedicated to open source solutions for the challenges facing healthcare. The primary objective of the workshop was to achieve compatibility among contributed code within the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA), the EHR software used at approximately 2,500 facilities worldwide. “A VistA code base with a common community-aligned platform will allow an unimpeded exchange of innovations and reduce duplicitous developments among users and developers,” said Dr. Seong K. Mun, President of OSEHRA. Read More »

OSEHRA Posts Video of Scheduling System Industry Day

Roger A. MaduroI heard today from Kris Prendergast, OSEHRA's open source community organizer. She gave me a heads up that OSEHRA has posted the full recording "Industry Day" that the US Deaprtment of Veterans Affairs (VA) conducted on June 18. As detailed in this press release, several of the key technical groups in the VA joined forces to host this day-long event. The event provided an intense and productive discussion of the VA's new scheduling application called Medical Appointment Scheduling System, or MASS for short (gosh, can't the folks at the VA come up with good names!).

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OSEHRA to Hold Community Calls to Discuss VA Digital Health Platform [Updated]

OSEHRA is holding a community call today and next Thursday, Sept. 29, with the open health community to discuss the response of the open source community to the recently release RFI by the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) for a "digital health platform." Notice with details from Seong K. Mun below..."According to the RFI (which is attached to this message), VHA "desires a Next Generation Digital Health Platform that is integrated, future-proof and optimizes the cost of operations. To achieve these goals, VA is considering establish an interoperable digital health platform that leads to Easier Access to Care for the Veteran, Better Outcomes for the Veteran and more efficient operations for the VHA"

Overview of Open Source and VistA in the UK's NHS

There is much widely publicised interest from NHS England in encouraging the development and implementation of open-source software in the National Health System (NHS) with the debate raging in a number of forums, notably on EHI where this article and the comments it has generated are vital reading for anyone interested in this issue. This debate has been fueled by the availability of NHS England’s £260 million Technology Fund which is actively soliciting open source projects include bids to implement an NHS VistA... Read More »

Paralyzed Veterans Of America Endorses Clancy For Permanent Under Secretary For Health

Press Release | Paralyzed Veterans of America | December 23, 2014

In a statement released today and letter sent to President Barack Obama, Paralyzed Veterans of America (Paralyzed Veterans) and Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA) expressed their support for Dr. Carolyn M. Clancy as the permanent under secretary for health...

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Phillip Longman's Senate Testimony Before the The State of VA Health Care Hearings

Phillip Longman | U.S. Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs | May 14, 2014

We need to open up the VA and grow it, extending no-questions-asked eligibility not only to all vets but to their family members as well. This not only makes clinical sense, it also makes economic sense. So long as the VA remains one of, if not the most, cost- effective, scientifically driven, integrated health care delivery systems in the country, the more patients it treats, the better for everyone.

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