I spoke with a physician yesterday who wants to try installing FOIA VistA because he can't get his hands on VOE. He said that VOE is a hot topic of discussion at his hospital and that 100% of the docs are convinced that VOE is not being released because "Big Business" is applying political pressure to CMS to stop it. They think that all of the testing and waiting to meet standards is just a smoke screen and that it will never be released.
I think we need to move along and provide these docs with a very attractive alternative that can later have the VOE enhancements applied to it as as patches. Hopefully the upcoming development meeting will be successful in producing that alternative. I do not want this doctor or others to think they are loosing out on the VistA-Office EHR enhancements if they start by using VistA now. We need to keep in mind that the ultimate goal is that all of these flavors of VistA will become one VistA and that we are all pulling in the same direction. It just seems hard to see that at times with VOE here and OpenVistA there, etc., but we need to keep our eye on the prize and let those we talk to about VistA know it as well. On Sunday 09 October 2005 04:00 am, JohnLeo Zimmer wrote: >From AMA News: October 10, 2005 "CMS takes baby step toward EMR network" The government is testing an electronic medical record based on a system used by the VA. The system will not be free to doctors. The grand plans of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to create a national health information network will soon be off to a humble start. CMS plans to recruit five to 10 small practices to test what it hopes will become a widely used electronic medical record. However, if physicians were hoping to get a free system from CMS, they're out of luck. Even those participating in the test will have to pay. The select group of practices will take a year-long test drive of the VistA-Office Electronic Health Record software, which is a modification of the EMR that U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs hospitals have used for 20 years. CMS says that a post-test evaluation of undetermined length, it would release a full production version of the software. The VistA-Office EHR software itself is only $37, but those test practices will be required to pay $2,740 in licensing and maintenance fees. For any practice with more than seven users for that software -- a user being anybody, physician or otherwise, who uses the system -- that price will go higher, though CMS didn't say how much. Those costs, while lower thanmost EMRs on the market, are giving some physicians pause. "It's going to be hard for someone to just volunteer and go ahead and implement this for evaluation if they have to spend this much just to get it up and running," said Steven E. Waldren, MD, assistant director of the Center for Health Information Technology at the American Academy of Family Physicians. The licensing and maintenance fees are costs "that CMS does not have the authority to pay for," said Cynthia Wark, deputy director of the information systems group in the office of clinical standards at CMS. The agency is not selling the system directly. Instead, it is licensing the VistA-Office system through private vendors. Some believe that doctors who volunteer despite the cost could benefit by helping shape the final product. "If they are an early adopter, they may want to jump in on this to try it out and experiment. If they are more cautious, they should wait," said AMA Secretary Joseph M. Heyman, MD. ... ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: Power Architecture Resource Center: Free content, downloads, discussions, and more. http://solutions.newsforge.com/ibmarch.tmpl _______________________________________________ Hardhats-members mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hardhats-members -- Nancy Anthracite ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: Power Architecture Resource Center: Free content, downloads, discussions, and more. http://solutions.newsforge.com/ibmarch.tmpl _______________________________________________ Hardhats-members mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hardhats-members
