At 09:47 AM 1/4/2003 -0500, John Gage wrote:
It was Sherlock Holmes, I believe, who said, "Eliminate the impossible, and whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth."Why should this be ignored? VistA can already be connect with CORBA: http://www.esitechnology.com/library/downloads/esiobjects/EOdescription.asp
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?
At one time a CERNER engineer said they were implementing all of the OMG CORBA interfaces, but I've not seen
evidence of this in their commercial offerings.
We should be able to have full interoperability between CERNER and VistA so that one could build a federated medical record system with both. One should not have to use only one system in all hospitals. We all will be losers if this is the result. Integrating heterogeneous systems is needed if we are to really succeed in healthcare. I think the open source community needs to take the lead in this area.
Dave
You make the call. Patients are dying while you decide (ref IOM, etc.).(This posting is loosely in response to Dan's posting)
