Open Source Hospital Information System to be Packaged for Debian

The Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA), an open source hospital information system used in 160 hospitals, several hundreds of clinics and more than a hundred nursing homes, will become part of the Debian free software distribution. This was announced at the Libre Software Meeting (LSM/RMLL) in Geneva, last week Wednesday.

This project packages software applications for medical care and microbiology research. The Debian Med members locate free and open source software that are used for either of these purposes. They make these applications available through the Debian software repository. "It is not a separate distribution", says Tille. "We merely make such applications ready for use by medical care organisations."

Work on getting the Vista hospital information system into Debian started early this year. This HIS consists of more than 150 software modules on clinical care, financial functions and hospital infrastructure. Getting it into Debian is more a matter of organising the applications rather than making changes to the software itself, Tille says. "The key is to understand the complexity of the system by working closely together with the upstream developers to get a reasonably shaped set of packages."...