Nandalal, No offence intended...your point is "very old" too and has been made by many in health informatics for many years now. In the mean time VistA continued to evolve and for some time now we have had OpenVista too.
There is far more to an application than the underlying nuts and bolts...which I might add work very efficiently and very well in VistA. Certainly it can be improved and the whole point of open source IMHO is to work and improve on the valuable contributions that have already been made. In VistA's case there is a tremendous amount of value and effort on the part of the US VA that can be built upon. As for the economic argument...one has to consider the total opportunity cost to societies and health systems of waiting for the ideal system to come along...does one start with something proven and works today and evolve from there or start with a clean sheet and reinvent the wheel. I am sure that both strategies will prevail. Cheers, Joseph On Fri, 2003-12-19 at 10:27, Nandalal Gunaratne wrote: > > http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3331739.stm > > Interesting. But this is very old software and maybe unsuitable for > the purpose. Open source software has gone very far indeed since the > days of VistA. It will eventually cost the poorer countries to go in > for obsolete software. > > Nandalal > > Nandalal Gunaratne > Urological Surgeon > Colombo South > Teaching Hospital > Sri Lanka
