Clinton;
You have been reading our
mind. These are issues which are near and dear to our hearts.
As you might imagine, VistA has been built by area specialist (physicians,
pharmacists, nurses, and other professionals who had to live with the
product). They have added to the model in numerous ways. These
decades of progress are a legacy we want to keep intact and continue the
evolution of this Open Source model into the possible tool kit what should be
available to all health care providers everywhere. Welcome! We
are looking forward to meeting with you and your associates in Boston. You
might add to your list, internationalization.
Excellent; Chris
Richardson
- Original Message -
From:
Daniel, Clinton E.
To: hardhats-members@lists.sourceforge.net
Sent: Monday, March 07, 2005 1:37
PM
Subject: [Hardhats-members] Identify
research needs - input from the Vista community
Clinton Daniel
here. I am the University of South Florida (USF) graduate student in Tampa,
Florida. Myself, along with two other students will be attending the 12th
Vista Community meeting in Boston, MA. We are interested in a number of areas
concerning the Vista system, ie. FOIA Vista or OpenVista - or others versions.
Our interest in
the meeting is to learn as much as we can about the Vista system and to
identify as many research needs as possible which could benefit the Vista
community and Health Information Systems. Below are some ideas that have been
drafted. If any of the terms used below have not been clearly defined within
your community or Vista projects in general (ie. "open source") and could be
applied in a more literal sense, then please feel free to correct our
terminology as it relates to the question. Any input would be greatly
appreciated.
We
would like to have an open session in which we discuss possible academic
research directions. Practicioner input would be greatly appreciated as
key figures in the academic community (Zmud and Benbasat, Davenport and
Markus, Lyytinen,Lee) havebeen calling for more relevance in MIS
research.
Topics open for discussion would include, but not be
limited to:
Innovation diffusion - how can we (the IS
community)spread the use of VISTA and other open source
technologies?
Change management - how can we (the IS community)
manage and integrate software changes (resulting from moving from proprietary
to open source) into business practices?
Standards definitions - how can we (the IS community)
set standards for different open source
technologies?
Open source quality - how can we (the IS community)
ensure software quality. This is especially relevant when applied to
health information technology as changes in formats, processes or variable
naming,may have an impact on a patient's
well-being.
Open source data management - how can we (the IS
community) manage our data for these open source initiatives? What tools
should be supported? What processes should be
implemented?
Open source security initiatives - how can we (the IS
community) protect our open source systems from third
parties?
Open source systems - how can we (the IS community)
facilitate the design and implementation of systems of systems?
Open source metrics - how can we (the IS community)
establish metrics for systems, like the VISTA system, to better compare
different implementations/organizations that run these
systems?
Practicioners comments and ideas would be welcomed to
flesh out the research opportunities that exist in the open source
community.
