The VistA Institute

http://www.vistainstitute.com/ (Functional & Technical)

Recently, the TIPG group based out of the University of Hawaii put together training curicullum along two tracks:CAC and System Administration. You must register to view the training, but it is free at this time.

The VistA Electronic Health University (VEHU)

http://www.vehu.med.va.gov/ (Functional)

Please note: The VEHU site appears to have been take offline (2/2008). We are researching why the VA has changed their policy of sharing these online courses. According to a staff member, we should be requesting course-by-course what we're interested in viewing. This will help them assess demand. Please use their help email address to request courses: becky.monroe@med.va.gov

Past years of VEHU presentations, training sessions and meetings are online at this site. Most have an audio and video component that provide us with a remote view of the sessions. Please note, the navigation on the left-hand side provides a search function, course catalog (all years), live meetings (2005), courses by Track (e.g. Provider, Nurse, Pharmacist, etc.) or "e-Xpress Train" ("self-paced, interactive training").

The VistA Documentation Library (VDL)

http://www.va.gov/vdl/ (Funtional & Technical)

This website provides a wealth of documentation on the various applications in VistA as they come in the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) release of the software. Each manual lists a publication and revision date which is helpful to know how recently the application was patched. While the VDL site allows you to search by document title, it does not search inside the PDF and Word documents for keywords and phrases.  Thanks to our friends at Google, you can do this quite easily!

You can use the "site:" option to tell Google to limit its searching goodness to a specific website. Say you wanted to learn how to setup the CPRS/CIS Tools menu, an option that's configurable via the server? I type the following into Google:

That first bit ("site:www.va.gov/vdl") tells Google to only search on that specific site and directory.

Or, perhaps I'd like to learn about the Clinical Procedures application and its interfaces? Since Clinical and Procedures are common keywords, we can chain them together using quotes, like so:

Intracare Implementation Series

Ignacio Valdes, VistA developer, doctor, and open source activist has published a series of threads on the Hardhats email list detailing installation tasks.  He has created an index of these messages on vistapedia.net.