Underground Railroad
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Chuck Hagel and the Secret War Over DOD & VA Electronic Health Records
...Today, the agencies are moving down separate modernization paths, with DOD working on its Defense Healthcare Management System Modernization program (DHMSM) and VA planning commercial acquisitions for the next generation of its Veterans Integrated System Technology Architecture, known as VistA. But analysts, including one of the founding developers of VistA, point to years of missed opportunities for DOD to leverage what many consider to be superior existing capabilities in VA’s VistA system — an ecosystem of modular application components that in most cases have become industry standards (VA’s troubled scheduling system notwithstanding)...
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Chuck Hagel – One of the Fathers of VistA
I am pleased to read that Chuck Hagel has been nominated to the position of Secretary of Defense. He was the Deputy Director of the VA when I worked for the Loma Linda VA Hospital, working on what would become the VistA Electronic Health Record System, one of the largest and most successful EHRs. Starting with very humble beginnings as a “skunkworks”, Chuck played a key role in helping to evolve our early back room prototypes into a VA-wide electronic health record that has won many awards and accolades by physicians. Read More »
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Chuck Hagel, Under Attack Again
Mr. Hagel would be the first enlisted combat veteran to be defense secretary, a grunt who has seen war from the trenches. Others who have plunged America into war — like the former defense secretaries Robert S. McNamara and Donald H. Rumsfeld, both former officers — had never fought in combat...
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Hagel lauded as early VA EHR protector
In 1981, Hagel, then age 35 and a former Army sergeant who received two Purple Hearts for wounds in Vietnam, was fresh from the campaign of newly elected President Ronald Reagan. He provided some badly needed political support for the rebel programmers, who had collectively begun to see themselves as members of the VA's “Underground Railroad.” Read More »
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Meet Chuck Hagel, early proponent of electronic health records
Back in 1982, when few organizations used electronic health records, Chuck Hagel, at the time deputy director of the Veterans Affairs Administration, played a key role in developing what became the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture -- the department’s electronic health record. Read More »
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VistA Evolution: What's Wrong With this Picture?
The VA has begun awarding a number of very high-value contracts under the umbrella of the VistA Evolution initiative (eg to ASM Research/Accenture), but in my opinion, there are problems looming on the horizon. From what I understand about the direction that these projects are taking (with encouragement, it seems, from within the VA), there’s a real risk that we’ll see a repeat of previous attempts to modernize VistA, the result of which was very expensive failure with essentially nothing to show for it. The losers, if this happens, are not only US taxpayers: it’s the Veterans whose future welfare depends on VistA4 being a success.
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