VistA - the Open Source health care system

[Carsten Agger]

I'm sorry if all of you have already seen this before, but this is
incredible and says a lot about the power of Free/Open Source
development models IMHO:

The world's most advanced and possibly only complete health care and
health record system is Open Source, free and Free, and developed by the
US Veterans Administration (and is called VistA).

A derived project is called WorldVistA, trying to bring free and Free
health care system to the entire world.

Here's a quote from this project's home page at SourceForge
(http://worldvista.sourceforge.net):

"The OpenVistA project will help its adopters eliminate [license] fees
by allowing VistA to run on the GT.M programming environment and the
Linux operating system, both of which are open source and free. By
reducing licensing costs, OpenVistA frees up money to be spent on
medicine, medical professionals, and other resources more likely to
directly improve patient care. Like all WorldVistA projects, the
OpenVistA project not only provides adopters with the software itself
but also transfers knowledge and expertise and builds long-term mutual
support relationships between adopters and the rest of the worldwide
VistA community."

Here's an interesting article on VistA and the VA from Washington Monthly:
The Best Care Anywhere:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2005/0501.longman.html

And here's the VA's official CPRS/VistA demo site with more links and a
working demo (Windows only, alas!):

VistA/CPRS demo: http://www1.va.gov/CPRSdemo/

I apologize if this is not interesting for this forum - my own comment
is w00t! An open source health care system, saving lives every day,
ready for everyone to adopt, and which scales from a single GP practise
to the entire VA with 25 million patients.

If Mark Shuttleworth wasn't already busy supporting education, this
would be an ideal project for anyone with his kind of possibilities to
promote.

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