'Open Source' VistA Installations in Louisiana and other Mississippi Basin states

The installation and use of 'open source' electronic health record (EHR) systems has continued to spread across the U.S., including many of the states that border the Mississippi River. For example, see the following map of healthcare facilities running some variant of the open source world renowned VistA electronic health record (EHR) system.

The Mississippi's watershed drains all or parts of 31 U.S. states that lie between the Rocky Mountains and Appalachia. States that border the Mississippi include Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

To better illustrate what this means, let's look at just one of these states in the Mississippi Basin. In the state of Louisiana, all of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) healthcare facilities are continuing to use the award winning VistA System. VA healthcare facilities (e.g. hospitals, clinics) using VistA include the following sites:

The following are other Federal, State, and local government healthcare facilities in Louisiana currently using other derivatives of the VistA system, e.g. CHCS, OpenVistA, vxVistA, OHUM VistA, WorldVistA.

* Take the time to read the following news article posted on Open Health News (OHN) about the  Implementation of VistA at Beauregard Memorial Hospital in Louisiana. Several other installations of VistA in local community hospitals are currently underway.

VistA, or one of its derivatives, is just one of several widely used EHR systems in the country. Another popular 'open source' EHR systems being used in Louisiana is OpenEMR. It has been estimated that there are more than 5,000 installations of OpenEMR in physician offices and other small healthcare facilities across the U.S. serving more than 30 million patients.

For the past year, Open Health News (OHN) has been working hard at assembling all the data regarding VistA implementations around the world and creating maps showing where VistA is implemented. The results of this research will be published in a Special Report, aptly titled "VistA: The EHR of Record", next month. Stay tuned for upcoming announcements about the release of this report and to go about purchasing your own copy of it from OHN.