VistA will survive

Despite what may be a Department of Defense decision to kill the VA's VistA system, advocates for the open source hospital computing software insist it will survive.

Medsphere has built its business model on the software, and ending its use by the VA will not change that.

Open source advocate Fred Trotter said Medsphere is planning a press release which attacks both the political and business problems directly, offering praise for their stance.

Medsphere co-founder Scott Shreeve has also come around on his former company, and recently offered a complete history of DoD bamboozlement at his blog.

Shreeve credits Tom Munnecke and George Timson with getting the system into production, Medsphere with keeping it alive in this decade and says that the community which has grown up around the software could solve its present problems if given a chance.

More important to the future, Shreeve adds, is that VistA now has a worldwide community, that the software will continue to improve, and there is nothing the government can do to change that.

The software is now in use in the Kingdom of Jordan and was a finalist in this year's Stockholm Challenge competition, which honors community development programs.

In all the scandals of this decade that of the VA's computer system has to rank pretty far down the list. But unlike with many other scandals, this is one we can recover from.