Sonny Montgomery

See the following -

Chuck Hagel – One of the Fathers of VistA

Tom Munnecke | Tom Munnecke's Eclectica | January 6, 2013

I am pleased to read that Chuck Hagel has been nominated to the position of Secretary of Defense.  He was the Deputy Director of the VA when I worked for the Loma Linda VA Hospital, working on what would become the VistA Electronic Health Record System, one of the largest and most successful EHRs.  Starting with very humble beginnings as a “skunkworks”, Chuck played a key role in helping to evolve our early back room prototypes into a VA-wide electronic health record that has won many awards and accolades by physicians. Read More »

Chuck Hagel, Under Attack Again

Myra MacPherson | New York Times | January 8, 2013

Mr. Hagel would be the first enlisted combat veteran to be defense secretary, a grunt who has seen war from the trenches. Others who have plunged America into war — like the former defense secretaries Robert S. McNamara and Donald H. Rumsfeld, both former officers — had never fought in combat...

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Meet Chuck Hagel, early proponent of electronic health records

Bob Brewin | NextGov | January 7, 2013

Back in 1982, when few organizations used electronic health records, Chuck Hagel, at the time deputy director of the Veterans Affairs Administration, played a key role in developing what became the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture -- the department’s electronic health record. Read More »

Munnecke on "Dots-First" vs. "Links-First" Metadata Approach, or Why ICD10 is Going to Fail

Note that, even in 1986, the Committee on Veterans’ Affairs was savvy to, and advocating the use of metadata (then called the “data dictionary – a roadmap to the database.”  It understood its use in VistA (then called DHCP), its role in portability (then with the Indian Health Service), and hopes to use it for the Department of Defense’s Composite Health Care System. Read More »

Open Letter to Chuck Hagel: DoD still doesn’t know what the hell they are doing

...I fear that you are paving a road to a hellish destination.  Rather than lifting up the VA eligibility problem to a shiny new common information system, you are on the verge of dragging health IT into the same bureaucratic vortex that has already done so much damage in the past.  AHLTA was declared “intolerable” in a Congressional hearing 4 years ago.... Read More »