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This article reports that the twenty-year-old software developed by the U.S. department of Veterans Affairs (VA) could serve as the low-cost building block of a nationwide electronic health care record (EHR) system President Bush wants officials to deploy within the next decade, according to health management experts as of November 2004. This open-source software, based on the Veterans Health Information Systems Technology Architecture (Vista) of VA, could also become the basis of affordable EHR systems worldwide. Officials at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) want to use Vista to stimulate the adoption of EHR systems by doctors with a new public-domain version of the software, Vista Office-EHR, developed in conjunction with VA officials. Capt. Cynthia Wark, a Public Health Service nurse who is the acting deputy director of the information systems group at the Office of Clinical Standards and Quality of CMS, said agency officials are developing Vista-Office to improve the quality of health care while promoting the adoption of health care information technology by doctors' offices and clinics. Officials are targeting Vista-Office to small medical offices that have one to eight doctors. |
