VA wants to share aging health IT system
VA CIO Roger Baker has asked IAC for help in formulating ideas to spread the department's health information technology system more broadly into the private sector
The Industry Advisory Council has accepted a challenge from the Veterans Affairs Department. VA Chief Information Officer Roger Baker recently asked IAC for help in formulating ideas to spread the department's health information technology system more broadly into the private sector. Now IAC has taken up the charge by forming a working group that Ed Meagher will lead to help develop those ideas.
Meagher is director of strategic health initiatives at SRA International and former deputy assistant secretary for IT at VA.
With industry's involvement, questions are coming to the fore, including whether anyone would want to use VA's aging system — and the answer appears to be yes.
“There is definitely a demand, and it probably would be very competitive with commercial electronic health record systems,” said Lauren Jones, principal analyst at Input, a market research firm in Reston, Va.
The decades-old system, known as Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA), needs to be refreshed. But Baker said he believes now is an ideal time to revitalize the system and distribute it more broadly in the private sector because the Obama administration is giving a $20 billion boost to electronic health records, several industry experts say.
The modernization is likely to include updating VistA’s architecture and conforming with OpenVistA, an open-source version of VistA, said Larry Albert, president of the health care sector at Agilex Technologies, who has worked on VistA. Another goal might be making VistA easier to use while also maintaining its clinical richness, he said.
The broader health provider community would greatly benefit from access to an open-source VistA with the Connect open-source interface to the Federal Health Architecture, he said. That would combine an electronic health record with information exchange and system security, Albert said.
“VA ought to explore leveraging the Connect gateway,” he said. “The programs complement each other.”
Whatever the VA does, doctors and hospitals nationwide will be paying attention, said Jim Traficant, vice president of health care solutions at Harris.
“The reach of VistA is broad,” Traficant said. “If you can leverage that, it will accelerate the adoption of electronic health records.”