Sherlock Holmes

[John Gage]

It was Sherlock Holmes, I believe, who said, "Eliminate the impossible, and whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth."

As I survey the field of open source medical software, I see the impossible with one improbable exception: VistA.

I hypothesize that unless the open source community embraces VistA (embraces meaning starts throwing coding resources at it big time) that there will never be open source medical solutions. Not at the rate things are going now.

At our hospital it was Cerner versus VistA. Cerner won. Had there been a vibrant, interested, critically massed open source community surrounding VistA, VistA would have won.

Please recall that VistA is installed in every VA hospital and is beloved by users. Please recall also that today the VA is acknowledged to be at the forefront of patient safety initiatives, for example, barcode scanning of medications at the point of care.

Should the open source community really ignore this open source initiative in medicine because it isn't C++ or Java? Should the open source community pretend that VistA is just another front end/back end/other end that can be connected with everything else with .Net or CORBA?

You make the call. Patients are dying while you decide (ref IOM, etc.).

(This posting is loosely in response to Dan's posting)