Dear Dan and Balu,
I have followed this VITL matter for months. Greg Farnum scares the
daylights out of me.
On Fri, 16 Jan 2009, Balu Raman wrote:
Please give some room for VITL, you don't have to follow me in my
opinion. My opinion is formed by my dealings with them about 2 years
back, when they were clueless about FOSS. Since then they may have
seen the daylight for FOSS and may be in damage control mode and may
have put up a page on FOSS on their web site. You will see there a
letter to me from a Washington consultant, whom I did not contact or
talk to. It's strange that they put that letter up there, just to show
that they have considered FOSS. I still think they don't get it w.r.t
FOSS, may be, they get the Free(as in free beer) part but not the Open
part. They also do not know how a small practice is run. There's a
difference between FAHC and a rural physician practice, the latter is
preventive (and cognitive) and the former is after the fact.
VITL is actively excluding access to their code base (something I believe
called CPT codes). Several local Vermont companies are frozen out of this
market by their big business exclusive practices. For a Non Government
Organization funded by Vermont Taxpayers this is inexcusable.
With regards to Vista, I did play around with it, but I am dumb
learning Mumps. Both Mumps and Unix are over 30 years old, but you
don't see the elegance of Unix in Mumps. This is often expressed as
programs written by engineers as computer scientists complain. If you
have seen the original code for Spice (in fortran) you know what I
mean. I don't know how many Mumps folks are still around.
There are scores of Mumps-Vista folks. Their favorite tactic lately is to
to virtualize mumps and run Virtual Vista. The Veterans Administration
implementation is called Vista-VA. This is a study in itself.
I don't know if these things are relevant to VAGUE. Please be free to
shut me up :-)
- balu
Balu do not stop! VAGUE needs a presentation!!!!!
On 1/16/09, Dan Connelly <[email protected]> wrote:
Balu:
I am withholding judgment on VITL (http://vitl.net/). The Vermont
alternative to VITL (and GE) is Fletcher Allen (and Epic). This puts
VITL on this side of the angels.
There is some really sleazy history here... Rich Tarrant inclued.
Sort of. Open vxVistA now becomes a litmus test on VITL, goodness or
evilness (maybe). Open vxVistA is big FOSS ball coming into VITL's
court. CCHIT certified, to an extent, since its commercial cousin has
some flavor of CCHIT approval (according to Fred Trotter's piece).
Cetification is the most evil and excluding element in this whole dirty
game. FOSS sheds a bright light on this particular cockroach.
http://www.dssinc.com/PressRelease.htm
http://www.fredtrotter.com/2009/01/07/dss-frees-vxvista-changes-the-vista-game/
Personally, I have no experience with vxVistA. There is no code
release yet on Open Health Forge
(https://www.projects.openhealthtools.org/servlets/ProjectList).
Questions to you or others with knowledge of vxVistA:
1. Is vxVistA a satisfactory package for Ambulatory EHR?
2. Apparently commercial vxVistA has been adopted by the Veteran's
Administration. Anyone know if installed at the White River Jct
VA Hospital?
3. If its decent for Ambulatory EHR, I assume you are advocating for
it at VITL. Are there Vermont groups that should also
advocate? Or, just DSS, since this package has a commercail
manifestation?
-- Dan
Meta discussion. Multi-platform virtual machines (e.g., Java, Mono,
Dalik) increasingly relegate our Unix chauvinism to a back burner. Not
to mention MS's Windows Services for Unix. Open vxVistA is
multi-platform. So is Apache. But I digress.
BTW anybody remember VISTA's predecessor called CHCS (Composite Health
Care System) it ran in a VT-100 environment?
Kindest Regards,
Paul Flint
(802) 479-2360
/************************************
Based upon email reliability concerns,
please send an acknowledgment in response to this note.
Paul Flint
Barre Open Systems Institute
17 Averill Street
Barre, VT
05641
http://www.bosivt.org
http://www.flint.com/home
skype: flintinfotech
Work: (202) 537-0480
Fax: (703) 852-7089
Consilium
gratuitum .~.
valet /V\
quanti /( )\
numerantur ^^-^^
