Q&A: Dave Peters on open source adoption within Veterans Affairs

The high-profile attention open source adoption within the Veterans Affairs Department received from some now-retired political appointee executives was a spur to action – but also led over the past year to worries that with those executives gone, open source would no longer be a priority. Recently, FierceGovernmentIT spoke with David Peters, assistant deputy chief information officer for enterprise development, about what the department is currently doing in open source, and about the role that the Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance plays in modernization of the VA electronic health record, known as Vista.

FierceGovernmentIT: There's been some current of concern that with the departure of Peter Levin and Roger Baker that OSEHRA and the concept integrating open source lost its most voluble supporters, and as a result, that the issue of open source adoption has lost momentum.

David Peters: I can give you an idea from my point of view of what we're doing. I've reached out to other parts of the organization, we've essentially set up an open source intake group led by Chris Rhodes. There are a lot of different efforts going on in a lot of different directions...