CHCS

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Alex Hill

Alex Hill is the VP Corporate Development at CAV Systems Ltd. He has extensive hands-on experience in early-stage high-tech ventures in US, UK and Israel. This experience ranges from preparation of business plans, market-positioning in volatile markets, active involvement in initial market penetration, to the establishing reference sites. He has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to achieve results with limited human and financial resources. In sum, he brings real-world experience of creating market-awareness to the table.

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Coming Soon: Pentagon’s Multi-Billion Dollar Health Records Contract

Frank Konkei | Nextgov | April 25, 2014

Sometime in the coming months, the Defense Department will bid out its Healthcare Management Systems Modernization contract, an effort so large in monetary size and game-changing scope that it could significantly influence the future of health care in the United States.

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DoD/VA EHR Integration and Interoperability Conference

Press Release | Institute for Defense and Government Advancement (IDGA) | August 22, 2013

The Institute for Defense and Government Advancement (IDGA) announces the DoD/VA EHR Integration and Interoperability scheduled for September 16-18, 2013 in Arlington, VA. Read More »

Google Joins VistA Team Proposing Open Source EHR for the Department of Defense

Google has thrown its hat into the EHR ring by joining the team led by PwC which is proposing that the Department of Defense (DoD) upgrade their current EHR to Defense Operational Readiness Health System (DORHS), a customized application built for the DoD and based on VistA, the open source EHR developed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)...Google’s participation has enormous implications for both the DoD’s EHR and to the healthcare industry as a whole. By choosing the open source EHR team, Google...has sent a clear message to the world that VistA is the best option for the DoD.

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Government IT contractor sues VA over Cerner Deal

Arthur Allen | Politico | August 23, 2017

CliniComp, a major Pentagon and VA electronic health records provider, is suing the Department of Veterans Affairs over Secretary David Shulkin's decision to offer a no-bid contract to Cerner to replace the agency’s VistA system. The suit brought Friday in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims charges that the VA violated federal contracting law by making the June announcement without first conducting market research or assessing the cost of the contract. It demands that the judge restrain the VA from awarding the contract to Cerner until the protest is resolved.

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Munnecke on "Dots-First" vs. "Links-First" Metadata Approach, or Why ICD10 is Going to Fail

Note that, even in 1986, the Committee on Veterans’ Affairs was savvy to, and advocating the use of metadata (then called the “data dictionary – a roadmap to the database.”  It understood its use in VistA (then called DHCP), its role in portability (then with the Indian Health Service), and hopes to use it for the Department of Defense’s Composite Health Care System. Read More »

Open Letter to Chuck Hagel: DoD still doesn’t know what the hell they are doing

...I fear that you are paving a road to a hellish destination.  Rather than lifting up the VA eligibility problem to a shiny new common information system, you are on the verge of dragging health IT into the same bureaucratic vortex that has already done so much damage in the past.  AHLTA was declared “intolerable” in a Congressional hearing 4 years ago.... Read More »

RFI & RFP to be issued for VA/DoD iEHR software modules

Stephen Hufnagel | OEHRA News | June 4, 2012

CALL FOR INTEREST & PARTICIPATION: The VA/DoD Integrated Elctronic Health Rcord (iEHR) program will be issuing Requests for Information (RFIs) in June on Laboratory, Pharmacy and Immunization. Requests for Proposals (RFPs) will be issues around labor day. Immunization Management seems to be a perfect opportunity for the Open Source Community, including interested VA developers, to come together with repurposed VistA, CHCS and other Open Source alternatives to a purely commercial solution to iEHR capabilities/ applications. Read More »

Sorry VistA, DoD's health record won't be open source

Molly Bernhart Walker | FierceGovernmentIT | February 25, 2015

The Defense Department's next electronic health record will not be based on the open source architecture that supports the Veterans Affairs Department's EHR. A change to the Defense Healthcare Management System Modernization solicitation narrowed down the field of contractors vying for the $11 billion program – eliminating the only proposed solution built on the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture, or VistA.

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Strange Sales Tactic: Oracle Blasts Defense-VA on Use of Open Source Software

Bob Brewin | NextGov | October 16, 2013

Oracle Corp. put out a 19-page white paper last month that pilloried the Defense and Veterans Affairs departments for thinking open source software can save money...The white paper zeroed in on the now aborted effort to develop a Defense-VA integrated electronic health record as a prime example of the billions that can be wasted on an open source project – even though the Pentagon has historically resisted using VA’s...VistA system. Read More »

Uri Schor

Uri Schor is the Chief Technology Officer at CAV Systems Ltd. CAV Systems is one of Israel’s leading enterprise software companies. For four decades, the company has delivered organizational management systems in the Finance and Banking, Wholesale Distribution, Manufacturing, and Tourism sectors. The company’s entry into the US market resulted from the growing recognition of their expertise and tools for projects where Caché (MUMPS) systems are involved.

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US Defense Think Tank Calls for DoD to Adopt the Open Source VistA EHR and Avoid Closed and Proprietary EHRs.

One of the most prestigious U.S. defense think tanks, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), issued a white paper Thursday calling on the Department of Defense (DoD) to replace their existing dysfunctional “vendor-lock” medical records system with an electronic health records system (EHR) that is "extensible, flexible and easy to safely modify and upgrade as technology improves and interoperability demands evolve." The white paper warns that a "closed and proprietary" commercial EHR - such as the ones offered by Epic, Cerner or Allscripts - will lead to "vendor-lock” and isolation of health data. Read More »

VistA as an EHR System Core for DoD

Here is a copy of the full text of the proposal submitted by the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to the Department of Defense in response to the Request for Information for an electronic health record (EHR) solution that can replace the existing DoD EHR system. This is the approach that makes the most sense as the current core EHR that the Department of Defense (DoD) uses is based on a 30-year-old version of VistA. The current EHR crisis facing DoD stems from the inability to upgrade this older version of VistA. What the VA is proposing is basically an upgrade to DoD's existing core EHR. Read More »

VistA, AHLTA, CHCS: An Evolving Alternative Roadmap to the Future

The obstacles to continue moving U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) in a common direction with regard to their clinical IT systems are fairly well-known. Having made that statement, it may therefore seem strange that this blog suggests that a conceptually simple technical approach may have the potential to untie the Gordian knot that has defeated many previous efforts. The proposed approach is not some yet-to-be-developed technology that exists only on Powerpoint slides. In fact, the proposed approach is based on technology that has already been validated by the-powers-that-be – at taxpayer expense – and the official conclusion in the official report on file at the DoD(1) states unambiguously and explicitly that the technology works as claimed is scalable, and can handle very large M/Caché systems.

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WELL Health Technologies Becomes World’s First Billion-dollar Open Source EMR Company

Canadian start-up company WELL Health Technologies (WELL) just crossed the threshold a month ago to become the world’s first billion-dollar open source electronic medical records (EMR) company. WELL, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, has accomplished this milestone less than three years after its founding. WELL’s market cap is currently hovering between $1.2 and $1.3 billion. The company has developed a disruptive digital health platform model with an open source EMR core, and a firm focus on improving clinical outcomes by using the technology to assist physicians and patients focus on health and wellness. Its goal is to shift the industry from a highly fragmented and expensive sick-care system to a health care system.

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