VA Open Source for Joint Record 'Unfortunate'?

Lt. Gen. Charles Green, Air Force Surgeon General, who represents all three service Surgeon Generals, gave details this week to a congressional panel about the planned Defense and Veterans Affairs departments' joint heath record and its deployment schedule.

He said Wednesday he expects the departments to use the same six data centers to store their records two to three years.

Green said he also expects development of common applications in three to four years. But he then added -- and I listened carefully to this section of his testimony (1:12:29 to 1:13:36 here) to make sure I got it right -- "Unfortunately there is no guarantee because we are still looking at what will come out of VA's work with open source VistA...."

If I had VA CIO Roger Baker's job for a day, I'd place a quick call to Green to find out exactly what the above phrase means.