On Mon, 28 Feb 2005, Nancy Anthracite wrote:
Don't you think that the VA is one big fat carrot and stick? They are currently using the standard, and they may succeed in dumping M, but personally, I think they will fail and the question is whether they do it before or after blowing millions if not billions in an effort to port this system to something else. They should just fix what they have an get on with it. If they just quit trying to get rid of it, I think that they will be able to bring in new people to advance and maintain VistA, but it they persist in this misguided effort, they are just shooting themselves in their collective feet.
PLease note that of the recently announced 22 major vendors of EHR systems over half have products that use M (most probably Cache in my guess) and even though they dont presently make much of it they will benefit (as will our international users) from an evolving M standard. Part of the dialog will be in mechanisms of standards conformance. Those with MDC experience know that there were mechanisms for non-standard features that enabled testing of new features which, when proven, removed the "Z" prepended character. The reactivated MDC must develop a similar sort of strategy for acccomodating the interim divergences but this will be no different and less difficult that when the M standard started in 1972; it will take work but it can be done. All good things take work but there are attendeant benefits.
Being vendors of a dead language can't be good, at least not unless you deny what you are I guess, and you become "X" instead of M. That seems to be an attractive strategy that might be reversed if the MDC became viable again. Hopefully, the vendors and all of the big sticks with carrots will want to participate in that effort. If the VA ever sees the light, maybe they will participate as well.
My bet is that they will join if the community shows the will: IHS will in my bet be a close ally but DoD may a harder time with vendor reticence.
If push comes to shove and none of the vendors want to participate, maybe at least an ANSI standard can exist and progress to be there for the VA to use to move VistA along after the next congressional investigation explores where all of that money went when the VA tried to move VistA away from M!
On Monday 28 February 2005 02:55 pm, Bhaskar, KS wrote:I agree that from a user's perspective, having a standard makes a technology easier to accept, sell to management, sell to the general public, sell to politicians, etc.
From a vendor's perspective, it costs money to comply with a standard, and there must be enough people who say, "If you comply with the standard, I'll buy your product" (carrot) or, "If you don't comply with the standard, I won't buy your product" (stick). Especially in the case of a public company, there is a fiduciary responsibility to the owners (the general public) to spend money to maximize return.
In the case of an M standard, who would proffer carrots or take a stick to the vendors?
-- Bhaskar
-- Nancy Anthracite
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