Blog Posts

In a recent article VA's "Aviva" system was mentioned as their next generation platform for health systems.  Federal Computer Weekly has posted an article with a few more technical details that are making the specifics of this project more clear.

In other words, the VA has built a presentation layer, which in the near term is the clinical data viewer for medical record data shared between the VA and DoD (via the NHIN), but longer term, they believe will form the platform for newer applications.

Again -- the immediate design and development focus has been on health data exchange on the NHIN, but with modularity and extensibility kept in mind -- the goal is that Aviva can be used as a platform for future development.

Too soon to say much more as no real details on the technology and architecture have been revealed. Knowing a bit about the NHIN architecture and other projects within the Military Health Systems, we can assume it's a SOA-based system that allows the presentation layer to aggregate data from various sources, likely utilizing middle-tier services to process, normalize and extend upon the retrieved data.

You can read the entire article on Federal Computer Week.

In this Government Health IT article, the VA's CTO Peter Levin reveals plans for the 'next generation' VistA:

Unfortunately this is not a new concept within the VA.  This has been attempted at varying levels before.  Additionally it seems strangely premature. We know the new VA leadership is moving fast to turn around aging infrastructure and other halted projects. But, we also know they have engaged an industry advisor group requesting recommendations on modernizing VistA from outside experts.  That report is not yet available, so a 'decision' of this magnitude doesn't seem to make much sense.

The real answer will be in their budget -- did anything like 'Aviva' get funding?

There is some good news here though.  It appears that everyone in government health delivery organizations is heading in the same direction -- right now they are on different roads, but at least there is agreement on the destination.

The key takeaways are around architecture decisions:

• Separating the currently entangled data, business and presentation tiers is step one to modernization
• Convergence of functionality from Indian Health Services' RPMS and Veteran Affairs VistA

You can read the entire article online.

Hello everyone, my name is Eric Bennick and I am the simulation manager at Weber State University located in Ogden, UT. My main job is improving outcomes through the use of technology and simulation. There are several different technologies that we use such as:

• Manikins - Laerdal VitalSim, Simman, SimNewB and SimBaby.
• Advanced recording and debriefing system which allows peer review and critiquing.
• Interdisciplinary scenarios which provide cross training, eg. paramedics recieve NRP training and certification from respiratory therapy.
• Microsim pre-hospital and in-hospital software simulators.
• Various group building and leadership exercises.

I have been evaluating several different EMR systems ranging from basic web-based programs like OpenEMR to the various open source versions of VistA. Vista is by far the most comprehensive system, and allows for all the programs in our college to participate. I will try to update this blog as I move along and share my thoughts and experiences with everyone. I am also exploring the possibility of creating a separate build of OpenVistA appliance containing medical records and scenarios which we develop for simulation. Please share your thoughts and outcomes with me as well, I am always looking for ways to improve and innovate! I will include some images at the end of this post showing more about I do.

Eric B.

All images are property of Eric Bennick and Weber State University, Copyright 2010. Please do not reproduce or redistribute without obtaining permission.

Welcome -- thanks to Indra, Richard and Conor we have established this work group to document interfacing and integration capabilities in OpenVista and other VistA-based systems.  The goal is to make this simpler for new community members to work with the interfacing capabilities of VistA-based systems.  Long-term the thought is to address wider reaching integration such as HIEs, NHIN, etc.

On today's call we discussed a number of things...

Desirable Documentation:

(Ideally these will be links to documents in the future)

• Getting Started
  • HL vs. HLO
  • About Logical Links
  • About Protocols ("pub-sub" structure)
• How-to
  • Setup example logical links (A01-04, A08's, MSCs??)
  • Setup Mirth to accept messages

Future Topics:

• Patient Registration/ADT
• Patient Management Systems
• MPI
  • Sun Mural
  • Mirth Match
• Other open source interfaces?
  • Clinica Adelante
    • Quest
    • LabCorp

Conor provided links to the research he's already done to date:

• OpenVista Register-Admit-Change-Discharge (RG)
• QRY-A19 In Action
• MPI in Action

Government HealthIT posted a news blurb about the VA's (continued) efforts to return to their collaborative roots.  No doubt, if appropriately managed and acknowledged, this will be a moral boost as well:

Read the entire article at Government HealthIT.

Packages for the upcoming long-term support release of Ubuntu, version 10.04 (Lucid), have been uploaded to the apt repository.  Lucid is currently in Alpha 2, but we'll continue to monitor it and upload new packages as necessary. 

Note that although we're building for Lucid now, no active testing is happening, so if you're using Lucid, please test and report any issues you find!

Andy Pardue, Jeff Apple and I had an opportunity to present some of the platform technologies that are a part of the OpenVista stack at the VCM today.

• Andy walked through the capabilities of the OVID technology, including capabilities, contributions and important tutorials
• Jeff talked through the newly released FM Projection technology from an architecture and status perspective
• I took the final portion of the presentation and demonstrated FM Projection in use (including FM Visualizer, SQL queries in DBVisualizer and finally some reporting in Jasper's iReport tool)

Today was the fist day of the 20th VistA Community Meeting (VCM) in Tempe, Az.

Edmund Billings was given the opportunity to speak on the topic of VistA strategy, partnering with the client and Meaningful Use.  I think it is fair to say his presentation was well received and generated a good discussion within the audience.

Jon Tai and I presented an update on Medsphere.org and the various open source projects and releases.  The big announcement of the day was the release of FM Projection -- a technology that allows us to project FileMan structures into SQL structures (not replication or conversion) for querying via standard tools.  A recording the presentation was captured and is available:

Medsphere.org: Released

20th VCM, Tempe Az.