OSEHRA Releases Enhanced ViViaN™ Visualization Toolset

OSEHRA is pleased to announce a new version of our ViViaN™ visualization toolset. OSEHRA’s VistA Cross Reference (DOX) pages have gotten a great deal of positive feedback from VistA users/developers inside and outside of VA. However, it didn’t capture some of the more obscure package dependencies, and there was no ability to export reports. VA needed both capabilities to assist with internal development efforts, and funded a set of enhanced capabilities. The new version not only directly addresses VA’s requirements, but will also benefit the entire community.

ViViaN is actually driven by XINDEX, which is very familiar to VistA developers. The improved analysis capability was achieved by developing a new version of XINDEX, which is also now available for community use. With the new XINDEX tool, the DOX pages provide a much wider view of a VistA instance’s data.

Matt McCall and Peter LiWhile ViViaN has always been open source, the generation of ViViaN and DOX pages was a complex procedure with many “moving parts." To mitigate some of this complexity, OSEHRA has generated new documentation and a streamlined procedure with CTest-driven tasks to perform the bulk of the work. For certain environments, the Docker virtualization system can almost completely automate the process. This makes ViViaN a more portable tool.

We invite community members to take a look at the new ViViaN (and for developers, the new XINDEX). If you have questions or comments, please contact the Visualization Open Source Project Group, where ViViaN and XINDEX will be continually enhanced and maintained in the future as an open source project.

About OSEHRA

OSEHRA is a nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating innovation in electronic health record software and related technology. Founded in 2011, OSEHRA is a rapidly growing open source community with over 850 registered members representing 160+ industry, academic, and government organizations. OSEHRA supports an open, collaborative community of users, developers, and researchers engaged in advancing health IT. OSEHRA hosts software repositories for managing applications such as VistA, RPMS, Blue Button, popHealth®, and others. OSEHRA is an ANSI-accredited Standards Developing Organization and a member of global industry associations such as the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), Health Level 7 (HL7), Open Source Initiative (OSI), and Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE).